The Hegel-Marx Connection

The Hegel–Marx Connection Edited by Tony Burns and Ian Fraser The Hegel–Marx Connection Also by Tony Burns NATURAL ...

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The Hegel–Marx Connection Edited by

Tony Burns and Ian Fraser

The Hegel–Marx Connection

Also by Tony Burns NATURAL LAW AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

Also by Ian Fraser HEGEL AND MARX: The Concept of Need

The Hegel–Marx Connection Edited by

Tony Burns Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Politics Nottingham Trent University

and

Ian Fraser Lecturer in Political Theory Nottingham Trent University

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–75136–1 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–23403–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Hegel–Marx Connection / edited by Tony Burns and Ian Fraser. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–23403–1 (cloth) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883—Contributions in political science. 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831—Contributions in political science. I. Burns, Tony, 1953– II. Fraser, Ian. JC233.M299 H44 2000 320'.01—dc21 00–023810 Editorial matter, selection and Chapter 1 © Tony Burns and Ian Fraser 2000 Chapter 4 © Tony Burns 2000 Chapter 7 © Ian Fraser 2000 Chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, 8–10 © Macmillan Press Ltd 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors 1 Introduction: an Historical Survey of the Hegel–Marx Connection Ian Fraser and Tony Burns

vi vii 1

2 Hegel and Marx: Reflections on the Narrative Terrell Carver

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3 Hegel’s Legacy Joseph McCarney

56

4 Marx and Scientific Method: a Non-Metaphysical View Tony Burns

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5 From the Critique of Hegel to the Critique of Capital Christopher J. Arthur 6 Marx’s Doctoral Dissertation: the Development of a Hegelian Thesis Gary K. Browning

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7 Hegel and Marx on Needs: the Making of a Monster Ian Fraser

146

8 Recognition and Social Relations of Production Andrew Chitty

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9 The End of History in Hegel and Marx Howard Williams

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10 Hegel and Marx on International Relations David Boucher

217

Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements The present volume is the outcome of a conference on the Hegel–Marx connection which was organised by the Political Theory Group in the Department of Economics and Politics at Nottingham Trent University in March 1997. All the contributors presented a paper at the conference. In some cases the original presentation has been modified. Chapter 1, by Terrell Carver, also appears as Chapter 9, ‘Philosophy and Politics: Marx’s Hegel’, in T. Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press & Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State Press, 1998). A longer version of Chapter 7, by Andrew Chitty, also appears in Historical Materialism, 2 (1998), pp. 57–97. Chapter 3, by Joseph McCarney, appears in Res Publica, vol. 5, no. 2 (September 1999). Parts of Chapter 9, by Howard Williams, are taken from H. Williams, D. Sullivan and G. Matthews, Francis Fukuyama and the End of History (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997). All these papers are reproduced, in their modified form, by permission of the publishers. The editors would especially like to thank their colleague, Lawrence Wilde, for his advice, support and encouragement, both when organising the conference and afterwards.

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Notes on the Contributors Christopher J. Arthur taught philosophy for 25 years at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Dialectics of Labour (Blackwell, 1986), and has published editions of Marx’s and Engels’ writings. He recently edited Engels Today: A Centenary Appreciation (Macmillan, 1996) and (with G. Reuten) The Circulation of Capital (Macmillan, 1998). David Boucher is Professorial Fellow in the School of European Studies, Cardiff University. He is the author of Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Martinus Nijhof, 1985), The Social and Political Thought of R. G. Collingwood (Cambridge, 1994). A Radical Hegelian: the Political and Social Philosophy of Henry Jones (University of Wales Press, 1993), and Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present (Oxford University Press, 1998). He has edited The British Idealists for the Cambridge University Press and is currently working on the relationship between communitarianism and British Idealism. Gary K. Browning was appointed Professor of Politics at Oxford Brookes University in 1997. He is co-editor of the journal, Politics. His books include Plato and Hegel: Two Modes of Philosophising About Politics (Garland, 1991), Politics: An Introduction (co-author) (Routledge, 1997), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (editor.) (Kluwer, 1998), and Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy (Macmillan, 1999). Tony Burns is a senior lecturer in philosophy and politics at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Natural Law and Political Ideology in the Philosophy of Hegel (Avebury Press, 1996). He has contributed to a number of academic journals, including the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, History of Political Thought, Contemporary Politics, Politics, Sociological Review, the British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies and Diderot Studies. He is currently writing a book on The Aristotelian Natural Law Tradition, to be published by Ashgate Press. Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. He has written extensively on Marx and Engels, including Engels in the Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series (1981) and Marx for the Cambridge ‘Companions to Philosophy’ (1991). He is author of Marx and Engels: vii

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Notes on the Contributors

The Intellectual Relationship (Harvester Press, 1983), Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought (Macmillan, 1989), and The Postmodern Marx. He has recently completed new translations in Marx: Later Political Writings (1996) for the Cambridge ‘Texts in the History of Political Thought’, and three of his own books have been translated into Japanese. Andrew Chitty teaches philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is co-editor of Has History Ended? Fukuyama, Marx, Modernity (Avebury Press, 1994), and has published articles on Hegel and Marx. He is currently working on a book on the ontological basis of Marx’s social thought, with particular reference to the ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘human being’. Ian Fraser is a lecturer in political theory at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Hegel and Marx: The Concept of Need (Edinburgh University Press, 1998). He has published a number of articles on Hegel and Marx in a variety of academic journals, including Capital & Class, Politics, European Legacy and Studies in Marxism. Joseph McCarney teaches philosophy at South Bank University. He is the author of The Real World of Ideology (Harvester Press, 1980), Social Theory and the Crisis of Marxism (Verso, 1990) and various articles on Hegel and Marx. Howard Williams is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Heidelberg, Mainz, Munich, Frankfurt, Wilfrid Laurier, Waterloo, Canada and at the Czech and Slovak Academies of Science. His publications include Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy (University of Wales Press, 1983); Hegel, Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic (Harvester Press, 1988); International Relations and the Limits of Political Theory (Macmillan, 1996); and (with D. Sullivan and G. Matthews) Francis Fukuyama and the End of History (University of Wales Press, 1998).

1 Introduction: An Historical Survey of the Hegel–Marx Connection Ian Fraser and Tony Burns

‘To conjoin . . . the names Hegel and Marx . . . is not so much to express a relationship as to raise a problem – one of the most challenging problems in the history of thought.’1 Without doubt, this ‘problem’ of connecting Hegel and Marx has been recurrent within Marxist discourse from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. By delineating the main lines of the historical development of this connection this Introduction contextualises the more detailed contributions that follow. What will be discovered is that the nature of Marx’s comments on Hegel’s philosophy has left an ambiguous legacy. One pervasive theme, though, is the interpretation of Hegel’s idealist philosophy as being shrouded in mysticism. Marx’s main contribution, according to this view, was to demystify Hegel’s thought through a more materialist, dialectical approach. At the same time, however, there have been those who have sought to rupture this Hegel–Marx connection and purge Hegelianism from Marxism altogether. Appropriate and expunge have therefore been the two main responses to Hegel’s influence on Marxism, as we shall see. To comprehend these developments fully, we need to return to the origins of the connection with Marx’s early involvement with the Young Hegelians. After elucidating Marx’s own comments on Hegel’s importance to Marxism, the trajectory of the connection through the main Marxist thinkers can be established. The final section illustrates recent developments of the connection, to which the current contributions are then related.

The Young Hegelians and Marx There is an ambivalence about Marx’s attitude to Hegel which is present throughout Marx’s life and which can be clearly discerned in even his 1

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Ian Fraser and Tony Burns

early writings. After Hegel’s death in 1831, two intellectual groupings encapsulated his philosophical legacy: the ‘Old’ or ‘Right-wing Hegelians’ and the ‘Young Hegelians’. For the Old Hegelians, Hegel’s passing meant that philosophy itself was now at an ‘end’. Conversely, the Young Hegelians argued for the further development and eventual transcendence of Hegel’s philosophy.2 Consequently, the simple preservation of Hegel’s philosophy by the ‘Old Hegelians’ was soon surpassed by the Young Hegelians, whose writings flourished until 1848.3 The Young Hegelians were at one in attempting to relate Hegel’s thought to their own historical circumstances and to realise what they considered to be Hegel’s philosophical inheritance. 4 To accomplish this task, they identified both an esoteric and an exoteric Hegel. The exoteric Hegel was a ‘conservative’, whose philosophy appeared to support the current political situation. The esoteric Hegel, on the other hand, contained potentially ‘revolutionary tendencies’, which the Young Hegelians attempted to expose. 5 Marx’s connection with Hegel can first be discerned within this debate and intellectual milieu, because he agreed with the general thrust of the Young Hegelian approach. In his doctoral dissertation, written between 1839 and 1841, Marx defended Hegel by stressing how his ‘disciples’ could and should explain ‘what took for him the form of exoteric thought’ by means of his ‘most profound ideas’. 6 One of the key figures in this approach to Hegel was Bruno Bauer, a close associate of Marx, who in 1841 published The Trumpet of the Last Judgement over Hegel. Against any conservative interpretation of Hegel, this work depicted him as a ‘covert atheist and revolutionary’. 7 That this was also Marx’s view is supported by the possibility that Marx ‘may well have collaborated’ with Bauer in writing The Trumpet. At the time, as David McLellan has indicated, ‘some indeed thought it was their joint work’.8 The Trumpet of the Last Judgement indicates an important development in the history of our understanding of the Hegel–Marx connection because it clearly indicates that the disciples of Hegel were now divided into ‘two warring camps’: conservative and Christian Hegelians, on the one hand, and revolutionary atheist Hegelians on the other.9 The publication of Moses Hess’s The European Triarchy, which linked Hegelianism with the rise of the emerging proletarian class, and thus theory with practice, further explicated the potentially radical nature of Hegelian thought.10 Similarly, Arnold Ruge’s call for all Hegelians to engage in political action and reject political servility, just as they had rejected servility to philosophy and theology, deepened the radicalism of the Young Hegelians even further. 11 However, such a radical interpretation of Hegel was not present

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in Marx’s first systematic analysis of Hegel’s writings, his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843). Here, as he does so often thereafter, Marx depicts Hegel as a mystical idealist who reverses the relation between subjects and predicates. For Marx, Hegel errs in beginning his analysis not with an ‘actual existent’, a ‘real subject’, but with ‘predicates of universal determination’, which manifest themselves as subjects through the ‘vehicle’ of the ‘mystical Idea’.12 Hegel mistakenly interprets social institutions, such as the state, as the manifestation of the Idea and thereby shrouds them in mysticism. Consequently, Marx argues for a materialist rather than an idealist philosophy, which roots its analysis in human individuals and which does not consider these individuals to be the mere play things of such a mystical divine Idea. Marx replicates this theme in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 where he critically considers Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Marx praises Hegel for conceiving the ‘self-creation of man’ as a process through which man affirms himself through his labour in the ‘form of estrangement’.13 Hegel’s problem, however, is that he recognises this labour as only ‘abstract mental labour’, and thus regards man’s production and creation of objects as mere ‘entities of thought’. 14 Similarly, Hegel regards entities such as wealth and the state, for example, as estranged from man, but only in ‘abstract, philosophical thought’. 15 All forms of estrangement, therefore, are imprisoned within the realm of abstraction resulting in a ‘mystifying criticism’.16 For Marx, then, Hegel fails to locate alienation in man’s material existence because he offers only a ‘dialectic of pure thought’.17 As is well known, many of the ideas associated with Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy at this time were stimulated by his reading of the works of Ludwig Feuerbach. However, Marx’s attitude towards Feuerbach himself at this time is not entirely uncritical. In his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), for example, Marx argues that Feuerbach’s materialism was inadequate because it was too ‘contemplative’ or ‘theoretical’. Within Feuerbach’s thought, theory and practice remained distinct rather than in unity with one another.18 According to Marx, Feuerbach failed to see that ‘all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice’.19 Ironically, Feuerbach’s materialism retained the very idealistic mysticism that he had been critical of in Hegel’s philosophy, according to Marx. As is indicated by the famous eleventh of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, this particular criticism of Feuerbach’s materialism in effect amounted to a criticism of a purely ‘philosophical’ approach to the world in general.

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Marx’s Later Writings In the Grundrisse notebooks (1857–8), Marx continued his early depiction of Hegel as being a philosophical idealist trapped within the realm of thought, and began to make a more explicit enunciation of his own materialist dialectical approach to the world. In doing so, Marx declared how a re-reading of Hegel’s Logic had been of ‘great use’ to him in this process, and expressed his desire to write a short book on the value of Hegel’s dialectic shorn of its mysticism. 20 In the Grundrisse, Marx is keen to emphasise the differences between his own dialectic compared to that of Hegel. He develops his own ‘dialectical’ approach to the study of political economy by making a distinction between general and determinate abstractions. General abstraction refers to the abstraction from concrete social circumstances, which allows a common element amongst phenomena to be focused on. An example of this, for Marx, is production in general, which is an abstraction from the differences that arise in production in particular social periods. 21 Determinate abstraction, on the other hand, is a movement from the general to the particular or concrete. For Marx the ‘scientifically correct method’ in the discipline of political economy is the ascent from ‘simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market’. 22 Hence, determinate abstraction involves understanding the concrete as a ‘concentration of many determinations’. 23 The world market is thus a concentration of determinate abstractions which go all the way back to labour. Again, Marx uses Hegel as a point of contrast to indicate the incorrect method for analysing phenomena. According to Marx, Hegel ‘fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself’.24 Instead, Marx argues, the movement from abstract to concrete is simply the way thought duplicates the concrete, or the material world, in the mind. Hegel mistakenly thinks that this movement from abstract to concrete is the way the concrete ‘comes into being’.25 He therefore understands the ‘conceptual world’ as the ‘only reality’ and forgets that the ‘real subject retains its autonomous existence’ outside the realm of thought. 26 Marx’s preoccupation with depicting Hegel as a mystical idealist here does not alter the fact that many commentators see the Grundrisse as being heavily influenced by Hegel’s philosophy. 27 For example, Hegel’s discussion of the development of individuality through labour, and the

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shaping of the external environment, is reflected in Marx’s emphasis on how a person is objectified through production. 28 Similarly, as Oakley has suggested, the Grundrisse also revealed how the ‘Hegelian dialectical method left its imprint on Marx’s expression’ of the relationship between production, distribution, exchange and consumption. 29 Moreover, Marx’s stated claim of examining simple categories central to capitalism at a high level of abstraction led him to criticise himself for giving the appearance of an idealist form of presentation 30 and thus uneasily ‘sounding too much like Hegel’.31 The ambivalence of Marx’s attitude towards Hegel in his later writings is also readily apparent in the well-known Afterword to the second German edition of volume I of Capital (1873). Marx uses the Afterword to demarcate his own dialectic from the dialectic of Hegel. To this end, Marx emphatically declares that his ‘dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it’.32 Again, Marx berates Hegel for supposing that ‘the process of thinking . . . is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea’. 33 In Hegel’s hands, therefore, the dialectic becomes ‘mystified’, which means that it ‘must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’.34 Ironically, however, it was Marx himself who at the time was accused of being something of an ‘idealist’, an accusation that had clearly worried him when writing the Grundrisse. In a review of Capital by the Russian economist I. I. Kaufmann, Marx was criticised because, although he had a thoroughly ‘realistic’ method of enquiry, nevertheless his method of presentation was that of a philosophical ‘idealist’; in effect, it was that of a ‘Hegelian’.35 Marx responded to this criticism by arguing that the method of presentation and that of inquiry must be different. The method of inquiry ‘has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection’.36 Once this process has been accomplished, the ‘real movement’ can then be presented, and the ‘life of the subject matter is reflected back into the ideas, as in a mirror’. 37 Marx realises that such a method of presentation could give the impression that the final result is merely an ‘a priori construction’ and hence philosophically ‘idealist’.38 Despite all these criticisms, Marx nevertheless insists that there is still a great deal to be said for Hegelian philosophy, and especially for Hegel’s commitment to ‘dialectics’. In the Afterword, Marx openly avows himself a ‘pupil’ of Hegel, that ‘mighty thinker’, and reveals that he had ‘coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him’ in the chapter on value in volume I of Capital.39 He also praises Hegel for

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being the ‘first to present’ the ‘general forms of motion’ of the dialectic ‘in a comprehensive and conscious manner’.40 For Marx, Hegel had made a crucial contribution to the development of a dialectical approach to the world, despite his mystical idealism.

Engels and Orthodox Marxism After Marx’s death in 1883 it is Engels who, in works such as AntiDühring (1877–8), Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (1880) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886),41 became the crucial figure in determining our understanding of the relationship between the thought of Marx and that of Hegel. Engels’ essay on Feuerbach – which says much more about Hegel and Marx than it does about Feuerbach – is a key text in this regard. There are many who would agree with David MacGregor’s claim that it is this particular text of Engels which, for almost ‘half a century’, provided ‘the sole interpretation of the relationship between Hegel and Marx’.42 One central theme of the essay is Engels’ interest in Marx’s attitude towards philosophy. Indeed, Engels is especially concerned to present Marx as a philosopher. At the least, he suggests that one of Marx’s primary interests concerns philosophical issues. And in particular, Engels discusses Marx’s attitude towards traditional questions of ontology and epistemology. Such a discussion inevitably requires, Engels points out, a ‘short, coherent account’ of the relationship which Marx’s thought has ‘to the Hegelian philosophy’. 43 In so far as the issue of ontology is concerned, Engels strongly emphasises the fact that Marx is a ‘materialist’, whereas Hegel is an ‘idealist’.44 Moreover, according to Engels, Marx’s ‘materialism’ is a doctrine which does not refer exclusively to the social world, or to the realms of economics and history. It is a doctrine which also embraces the ‘natural’ world: an all-embracing philosophical world-view. According to Engels, however, Marx is a materialist of a rather special kind. In particular, he is not a ‘mechanical’ materialist with views similar to those of the ‘Anglo-French’ materialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 45 The main difference between these types of materialism is that Anglo-French materialism did not see reality as undergoing any process of change or development, whereas, in Engels’ opinion, Marx’s ‘materialism’ is not ‘static’ but ‘dynamic’, and centres on Marx’s acceptance of one ‘great basic thought’, inherited from the philosophy of Hegel, namely the idea that ‘the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready made things, but as a complex of

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processes’. In short, unlike his predecessors, Marx possesses an appreciation of the importance of ‘dialectics’. Central to Marx’s philosophy is a commitment to the idea of a ‘materialist dialectic’. To understand the world from the standpoint of this materialist ‘dialectic’ is to understand ‘the general laws of motion’, which, according to Engels, regulate both the ‘external world’ and that of ‘human thought’. 46 The approach to the world adopted by this materialist ‘dialectic’ reveals the ‘transitory character of everything’ in that all things must inevitably undergo an ‘uninterrupted process of becoming and passing away’.47 Engels also strongly emphasises in this essay, in words which echo those employed by Marx himself in the second edition of Capital, that the relationship between Marx and Hegel is best understood by employing the metaphor of ‘inversion’. The Hegelian philosophy, Engels insists, ‘represents merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down’. Consequently, Marx’s philosophy is, Engels maintains, one in which ‘the dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head’, or rather, more accurately, ‘turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet’.48 Finally, Engels’ essay on Feuerbach also contains a brief account of Marx’s epistemological views, an account which, again, echoes that provided by Marx earlier, in the second edition of Capital. The key question here, Engels maintains, is the following: ‘Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality?’ Interestingly, Engels insists that Marx and Hegel are at one in answering this question in the affirmative. Consequently, Engels attributes to both Marx and Hegel some sort of ‘reflectionist’ or ‘copy’ theory of knowledge. 49 The difference between Marx and Hegel, Engels says, somewhat obscurely, is that Marx comprehends ‘the concepts in our heads once more materialistically – as images of real things’. He does not, therefore, like Hegel, regard ‘real things’ (in Engels’ own sense of this term, of course – that is to say, material objects) as images of this or that stage of the absolute concept’. 50 In Engels’ view, Marx’s commitment to such a ‘reflection theory’ is in no way compromised by the fact that Marx’s philosophy is based on a commitment to the principles of ‘dialectics’. For ‘dialectical philosophy’ itself is ‘nothing more than the mere reflection’ of the dialectical processes of reality ‘in the thinking brain’.51 It is Engels’ account of Marx’s attitude towards philosophical issues in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy which was to provide the philosophical underpinnings of ‘Marxism’ as it was later understood by the main theoreticians of the Second International. This account, which, even though Engels did not use it himself, is well

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captured by the expression ‘dialectical materialism’, was to become an integral element of what eventually came to be known as ‘orthodox’ Marxism. As Lucio Colletti has stated, Engels’ works were to become the ‘principal source’ for all the ‘philosophical problems of Marxism’ around the turn of the nineteenth century.52 For example, the interpretation of the Hegel–Marx connection expressed here by Engels was enthusiastically endorsed by Plekhanov, who was widely considered to be the ‘philosopher’ of the Second International.53 Throughout the course of the twentieth century, however, and some would say even before, Engels’ reputation as an authoritative source regarding Marx’s thought, and especially for our understanding of Marx’s relationship to Hegel, has frequently been brought into question. There have been many Marxists and students of Marxism who have argued that it is a mistake for us to assume unquestioningly that Marx and Engels thought as one with respect to all issues. According to these commentators, in his essay on Feuerbach, Engels misrepresents, misinterprets or misunderstands Marx’s opinions regarding most of the issues discussed above. In particular, these critics have focused their attention on the doctrine of ‘dialectical materialism’, which is central to ‘orthodox Marxism’ in the period of the Second International. According to them, ‘dialectical materialism’, as Engels understands it in his own later writings, is a doctrine which is not only fundamentally incoherent and confused, but also quite alien to the approach to the world which, it is claimed, is adopted consistently by Marx throughout his intellectual life. It is to this re-evaluation of the Hegel–Marx connection that we now turn.

The Re-evaluation of the Hegel–Marx Connection After Engels’ death in 1895, the first stirrings of such a reassessment of the Hegel–Marx connection occurred in the writings of the Italian philosophers Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce, and the French socialist Jean Jaurès. 54 Labriola argued for a non-determinist, anti-positivist interpretation of Marx’s thought, which counterposed Marx’s notion of ‘practice’ to the philosophy of idealism.55 On this account Marx was praised for breaking with Hegel’s idealism and for adopting a nonmechanistic philosophical materialism. His disciple, Benedetto Croce, however, whilst also arguing against positivism, retained Hegel’s idealism.56 Croce argued vigorously against Marxism’s claim to be a science and rejected the theory of value which lay at the heart of its critique of capitalism. Instead, Croce offered a Hegelian analysis of history as a progression towards socialism and individual morality through the

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development of culture. With Jaurès came an explicit attack on the ‘strict and rigid’ nature of Engels’ dialectical materialism.57 Jaurès praised Marx’s application of Hegel’s dialectic 58 and argued that no one could ‘pretend to understand Marx without penetrating to the dialectic origin, the deep source, of this thought’. 59 Engels’ interpretation also had a major influence on Lenin’s reading of Hegel, albeit ambiguously. For instance, Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908) faithfully reflected the ‘orthodox’ Marxism espoused by the other major theorists of the Second International. In this text Lenin relies heavily on the works of Engels and attaches great importance to the ‘reflectionist’ theory of knowledge which, as we have seen, Engels attributes to Marx.60 It has also been argued that the influence of Engels on Lenin’s understanding of the Hegel–Marx connection informs Lenin’s other main philosophical work, the later Philosophical Notebooks (1916).61 George Lichtheim, for example, has argued that in the later work Lenin merely perpetuates the ‘dialectical materialism’ of Engels and Plekhanov.62 Conversely, however, it has also been suggested that Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908), presented ‘a philosophical position utterly at variance’ with the ‘Notebooks’ on Hegel’s Logic.63 In the ‘Notebooks’, Lenin argued that the ‘reflectionist theory of knowledge’ is unable to copy objective reality completely, and idealism was not to be entirely dismissed. Lenin found in the ‘most idealistic of Hegel’s works’ the ‘least idealism and the most materialism’.64 Consequently, he could declare that ‘intelligent idealism is nearer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism’.65 Out of the ‘intelligent idealism’ of Hegel, Lenin stressed the importance of grasping the concrete dialectically as a unity of opposites through subject and object, theory and practice. 66 Hegel’s idealism, was still idealism, but it contained within itself a materialist basis which Lenin sought to invert to make it properly materialist. Consequently, Lenin exhorted all Marxists to read Hegel’s Logic if they were to understand Marx’s Capital. It is, however, the publication of Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness in 1923 which is usually considered to represent the most significant step in the re-evaluation of the Hegel–Marx connection. Lukács was pivotal in moving away from the ‘dialectical materialism’ that seemed to have a stranglehold over Marxism after Engels. In this work, Lukács makes an explicit attack on Engels’ lack of understanding of dialectics. Engels’ failure is to ignore the dialectical interaction between subject and object in the historical process, and replace it with ‘a onesided and rigid causality’ that smacks of economic determinism. 67 Only

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Hegel has attempted to overcome this dichotomy between subject and object. Lukács therefore returns to Hegel in order to unite dialectically these phenomena which have become separated. Hegel himself brings this union about idealistically through his notion of ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’, but for Lukács it is real human beings, as represented by the proletariat, who are the subject of history. 68 In his view, even though Hegel had done more than any previous philosopher to ‘discover the meaning of concrete totality’, and ‘was constantly bent upon overcoming every kind of abstraction’, identifying the proletariat as the ‘real driving force[.] of history’ was nevertheless the preserve of Marx. 69 For Lukács, Hegel ‘remained imprisoned’ in the ‘duality of thought and being’ and did not attempt to unite them concretely. 70 Marx’s contribution was crucial, therefore, because he made such a union possible by emphasising the importance of uniting theory with practice, as explicated in his Theses on Feuerbach. Engels is further excoriated by Lukács for inheriting two particular errors from Hegel. The first is to emphasise the objective nature of the ‘laws’ of the capitalist system with little or no reference to the subject at its heart – the proletariat. It is only through the consciousness of the proletariat that theory can unite with practice and subject with object, which the ‘positivist, mechanist and determinist views of Engels’ failed to grasp. 71 The second error is to extend the use of the dialectic to nature, instead of limiting it to history and society. For Lukács, the ‘crucial determinants of dialectics – the interaction between subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc. – are absent from our knowledge of nature’. 72 Consequently, ‘materialism’ for Marx is not a metaphysical system or an all-embracing philosophical world-view. Marx’s ‘materialism’ is of a much more limited kind, because it is confined solely to the socio-historical sphere. Lukács’ place in the history of our understanding of the Hegel–Marx connection is important, then, because he is usually considered, quite rightly, to be the first major thinker to challenge the ‘orthodox’ Marxism of Engels and the Second International. However, it must be acknowledged that Lukács’ legacy in this regard is actually an ambivalent one, for although his interpretation of the thought of Marx is in some respects innovative and radical, his interpretation of the thought of Hegel in History and Class Consciousness is quite traditional. Lukács is certainly respectful of Hegel’s contribution to Marxism and to the development of an emancipatory dialectical thought. However, he emphasises quite uncritically the importance of Marx’s own, traditional reading of

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Hegel’s thought as a form of mysticism. Consequently, in this early work, Lukács is content to endorse Marx’s view that Hegel is best seen primarily as a philosopher committed to a system of idealist metaphysics. Nevertheless, and largely as a consequence of Lukács’ intervention, an arguably more ‘Hegelian’ reading of Marx’s thought, in some respects very different from the views usually associated with ‘orthodox Marxism’, was now clearly on the agenda. As we shall see, this reinterpretation of Marx was to prove increasingly influential on a number of the main Marxist writers throughout the twentieth century.73 Lukács’ The Young Hegel (written in 1938, published in 1948) was a further impetus to this trend.74 Inspired by the publication of Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, and Hegel’s own early Jena writings in the 1930s, Lukács re-emphasised the radical nature of Hegel’s thought for Marxism. He discerned the ‘greatness and the limitations’ of Hegel’s dialectic in ‘the accuracy and the defects of his grasp of the contradictions and the laws of motion of capitalist society and its economics’. 75 For Lukács it is actually the ‘realism’ of Hegel’s economic thought in his early writings, rather than his metaphysical beliefs, which makes Hegel an important forerunner of Marx. Indeed, in Lukács’ view, Hegel’s realism is associated with such a ‘profound and true insight’ into the nature of the historical process that Hegel actually ‘went beyond what was possible within the framework of idealism’ and comes ‘within reach of true, materialist dialectics’.76 It is in this sense, Lukács maintains, that we can perceive a ‘direct link’ between the thought of Marx and that of Hegel.77 And it is in this sense that Hegel should be considered to ‘have been one of the precursors of historical materialism’, someone who was ‘led to incorporate powerful elements of authentic materialism’ into his own social thought, although ‘unconsciously’ and ‘somewhat in conflict with his own idealist programme’.78 For Lukács, Hegel’s dialectic was a ‘watershed in the history of philosophy’, despite its idealist basis, because it offered a ‘mediating link’ to a more ‘materialist dialectics’ that Marx developed after turning Hegel the ‘right way up’. 79 Although Lukács affirmed Hegel’s importance for Marx, he ultimately concluded that Hegel was a ‘child of his age’ and remained trapped within ‘the highest form of idealist ethics and so of bourgeois philosophy’. 80 This re-emphasis on Hegel’s importance to Marxism was also replicated in the work of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. In the Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1936, Gramsci reiterates Labriola’s emphasis on the philosophy of praxis and engages in a sustained debate with the idealist historicism of Croce. 81 Gramsci explicitly argues against

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the crude materialism of Engels and Plekhanov, declaring it a ‘philosophy of non-philosophers’.82 For Gramsci, Engels’ error in particular was that he ‘absorbed’ Hegelianism ‘definitively’ and ‘once and for all’ into a closed materialism in opposition to idealism. 83 For Gramsci, however, the ‘vital part of Hegelianism’ lies in understanding the historical process not as something dead, but as perpetually ‘in motion’ and requiring the constant renewal of a ‘philosophical cultural synthesis’. 84 In this way, idealism and materialism can be brought into that dialectical unity of a ‘philosophy of praxis’ of which Marx was the founder.85 Once again, therefore, despite his acknowledgement of Hegel’s contribution to Marxism, Gramsci considers Marx as having in some important sense superseded Hegel. Gramsci praises Hegel for giving ‘dialectical form’ to the ‘two moments of the life of thought, materialism and spiritualism’, but in his view Hegel synthesises these moments as ‘“a man walking on his head”’. 86 It was left to Marx, therefore, to ‘reconstruct the synthesis of dialectical unity’, and instead have a ‘“man walking on his feet”’.87 In this way Gramsci clearly alludes to Marx’s own critique of Hegel in the Afterword to the second edition of volume 1 of Capital, where the idealist dialectic is considered by Marx to require inverting in order to make it a properly materialist dialectic. 88 The publication of Hegel’s and Marx’s early writings also had a major impact in Germany, especially in the so-called Frankfurt School of critical theory. 89 Most notable was the appearance of Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (published in 1941).90 Marcuse follows Lukács by presenting a reading of the thought of Marx which strongly emphasises the view that Marx is not primarily a philosopher, but a social theorist whose ideas are informed by those of Hegel.91 Consequently, like Lukács, Marcuse argues against Engels that Marx’s ‘materialism’ should not by any means be considered to be an all-embracing metaphysical system. In particular, the ‘dialectical principle’, for Marcuse, as for Lukács, is ‘not a general principle equally applicable to any subject matter’, and especially not to the natural world. On Marcuse’s reading of Marx, the dialectical method is primarily an ‘historical’ method. Marx has an interest in ‘nature’ only in so far as nature itself ‘enters and conditions the historical process of social reproduction’.92 Marcuse strongly emphasises what he considered to be the radical aspects of Hegel’s thought. He depicts Hegel as a defender of the rights of reason which can reveal to people their own identity on the selftransforming path to freedom. Hegel’s writings are interpreted by Marcuse as emphasising resistance and revolution rather than the conformity and authoritarianism which were standardly associated with his philosophy

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at the time. Marcuse argues that, in so far as social theory is concerned, Hegel was the first German thinker to grasp that the anarchic nature of a free market economy meant that any form of rational community based on such economic principles is impossible.93 In addition, by grappling with the contradictions of need-satisfaction in a system based on abstract labour, Hegel brings theory into contact with practice.94 It is not at all surprising then that at one point Marcuse goes so far as to suggest that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is actually ‘materialist in its approach’ to economic and social affairs, because in it Hegel ‘exposes in paragraph after paragraph the social and economic under-structure of his philosophic concepts’.95 Despite these insights, however, Marcuse still represents Hegel’s thought as remaining ultimately within the confines of an idealist metaphysics. Consequently, he criticises Hegel for comprehending social and economic categories as being nothing more than disguised philosophical concepts instead of realising, as Marx would later, that the very reverse is the case. 96 For example, whilst Hegel established the economic category of labour philosophically, it was Marx who rooted that concept in the concrete actuality of the alienated worker in contemporary society. 97 Marcuse therefore sees the idealistic nature of Hegel’s thought as being surpassed by Marx’s own materialist analysis. The need for a reassessment of Hegel’s influence on Marxism also occurred in France from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. The philosopher Alexandre Kojève had given a series of lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the École des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939.98 Most French Marxists, therefore, were approaching Hegel through his work, which focused on the dialectic of the master–slave relationship and characterised Hegel as a revolutionary thinker. 99 Kojève applied Hegel’s emphasis on labour as a fundamental human activity, in the struggle for recognition to the situation of the working class. For Kojève, the working class were involved in a life-and-death struggle to overcome domination and achieve freedom. Kojève linked such an emphasis on the role of labour and the proletariat to Marx’s own writings, thereby emphasising the source of Marx’s radicalism in Hegel’s thought.100 Additionally, Kojève stressed how Hegel’s conception of reason itself was not abstract, but was embodied in the developmental consciousness of humanity. This developmental consciousness emerged in historical reality as a perpetual process of self-transcendence through labour and activity. For Kojève, ‘man’ can then become an ‘historical free individual’ who ‘attains full consciousness of a self’ that no longer has ‘any reason to negate itself and become other’. 101

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Henri Lefebvre, railing against what he considered to be the dogmatism of ‘dialectical materialism’ and of ‘orthodox Marxism’, especially as it was interpreted in the Soviet Union, was also keen to stress the Hegelian basis to Marxism at this time, especially in so far as the notion of ‘alienation’ is concerned. 102 For Lefebvre, Hegel is valuable in grasping how modern man was weighed down by necessity and poverty which severely limited his attempt to achieve moments of spirituality. However, Hegel ultimately fails to capture ‘the entire content of human experience’ because he reduces material reality to consciousness.103 Following Marx in his early writings, Lefebvre suggests that Hegel’s philosophy needed a content rooted in man’s material existence and not in the evolution of the human mind. 104 Lefebvre argues that Hegel’s idealism could not properly grasp the concrete realities of human existence. In contrast, theorists such as Jean Hyppolite suggested that Hegel’s contribution to Marxism was in illustrating how the alienation of man from himself established a crucial starting-point on the dialectical movement towards self-recognition.105 The failure of master and slave to recognise each other as a free being, and the concentration of this division in the individual as the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’, were the first moments of such a process. Hostility to what he considered to be the dogmatism of Engels was also one of the principal concerns of Jean-Paul Sartre in the period following the Second World War. Sartre rejected the supposedly scientific basis of ‘dialectical materialism’ on the grounds that science is incapable of dealing with concrete historical relations.106 Against Engels’ dialectics of nature, Sartre asserts that because nature does not have a history it also cannot have any dialectical development. Hence, Engels is accused by Sartre of ‘kill[ing] the dialectic twice over to make sure it is dead – the first time by claiming to have discovered it in Nature, and the second time by suppressing it within society’. 107 By attacking what he perceived as the philosophical rigidity of the principles of ‘dialectical materialism’, Sartre attempted to revitalise dialectical thinking within French Marxism at this time.108 For Sartre, Hegel’s error is in emphasising the identity between being, action and knowledge, whereas Marx suggests to the contrary that ‘praxis outstrips knowledge in its real efficacy’. 109 The dialectic, then, has to be rooted in the concrete existence of individuals if it is to avoid becoming some sort of ‘divine law’.110 In one way or another, then, and despite their disagreements with Hegel, French theorists like Lefebvre and Sartre have contributed greatly towards our understanding of the Hegel–Marx connection by showing

Introduction

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how Hegel was the source of Marx’s views on the role of dialectic, labour, alienation and reason. The vitality that this Hegelian influence gave to French Marxism after the Second World War was extremely significant, not only philosophically, but also politically. Orthodox Marxism, with its commitment to the idea of a ‘dialectical materialism’, and because of its associations with the politics of Stalinism generally and with the politics of the French Communist Party in particular, had by this time fallen into disrepute. In the early 1960s, the prevalent view within French Marxism was of Marx as a ‘humanist’ and a thoroughgoing ‘dialectician’, whose views had little to do with the alleged dogmatism of Engels and ‘orthodox’ Marxism. However, a full-frontal assault on Hegelianism, and an attempt to purge it from Marxism forever was about to begin. Some theorists argued that Hegel’s philosophy imported philosophical idealism into Marxism. Consequently, for Marxism to be genuinely materialist the principles of Hegelian dialectics had to be abandoned altogether. The germ of this view is, perhaps, to be found at the beginning of the twentieth century in the work of Eduard Bernstein.111 More recently, in France, this view is usually associated with the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, whereas in Italy, it is associated with the work of Lucio Colletti. The initial impetus for the more recent attempts to purge Hegelianism from Marxism, however, originated in the 1950s in the writings of Galvano Della Volpe. It is to this tradition of thought in the history of the Hegel–Marx connection that we now turn.

The Rejection of Hegel from Marxism In his The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1899) Bernstein, in a manner usually associated with empiricist and positivist philosophers, makes a clear distinction between facts and values, and hence between Marxism understood as body of genuinely ‘scientific’ knowledge, on the one hand, and Marxism as an ‘ethical ideal’ on the other. He maintains that these two things should not be confused with one another as Marx occasionally does. In Bernstein’s view, there are times when Marx allows his ‘sympathy’ with the working classes to ‘stand in the way of the scientific method’.112 Hence, Bernstein alleges, Marx was led to ‘maintain certain statements in Capital’ which are actually ‘falsified by facts’. The principal reason for this is Marx’s commitment to the Hegelian dialectic, or ‘the dialectical form’ of Marx’s Capital.113 According to Bernstein, Marx is led to make certain claims in Capital which are false ‘because the dialectical

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scheme’ which he follows requires him to do so. 114 Consequently, Bernstein maintains, the Hegelian dialectic might be seen as affording ‘a comfortable refuge’ for ‘the cant which sought to get a hold on the working class movement’ at the end of the nineteenth century.115 The solution to this problem is, Bernstein argues, for the Marxists of the Second International to abandon their commitment to the Hegelian dialectic, which is fundamentally anti-scientific in spirit. Instead of Hegel, Marxists should turn to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, so that they could then combine a genuine commitment to ‘science’ with a parallel commitment to socialism, understood as an ‘ethical ideal’ in the Kantian sense. Some years later, in his Logic as a Positive Science, Della Volpe also sought to reconcile Marxist method with scientific logic in an attempt to expunge any traces of Hegelian idealism from Marx’s thought. 116 According to Della Volpe, Hegel ‘never goes beyond the concept of a dialectic of pure thoughts, a monotriad of reasoning’.117 In contrast, the ‘genuinely material or real dialectic’ must become known not through pure thought but ‘through a logic that is itself a positive science’.118 For Della Volpe, then, the linking of logic with the experimental procedures of the natural sciences, as in the hypothetico-deductive method, is the way forward for Marxism. Lucio Colletti, Della Volpe’s pupil, also sought to expunge Hegelianism from Marxism. Colletti argues that Hegel’s philosophy is deeply contradictory because it is ‘half idealist, and half materialist’.119 The idealism is ‘clearly visible and undeniable’ whilst the materialism is represented in the ‘dialectic of matter’.120 For Colletti, this contradiction is present in the work of Hegel himself, as well as in the reading of Hegel’s thought presented by Engels, Plekhanov and Lenin. 121 The dialectical materialism of these thinkers is therefore rejected by Colletti because the ‘dialectic of matter’ contravenes the principle of non-contradiction 122 and so is really nothing more than a form of ‘absolute idealism’. 123 In place of dialectical materialism Colletti attempts to put forward a more materialist theory of knowledge grounded in science, again, with reference to Kant rather than to Hegel.124 Whilst Della Volpe and Colletti were important figures in the attempt to eject Hegel from Marxism, the greatest attack emerged in the work of Louis Althusser. Althusser rejected the emphasis on the notion of the subject that had been prevalent within the Hegel–Marx connection from Lukács onward, and also the crude ‘dialectical materialism’ of the Second International. He divided Marx’s writings between the early humanist tracts which were steeped in Hegelian influence, and the

Introduction

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more mature works that were not Hegelian – works produced after the so-called ‘epistemological break’.125 For Althusser, the mature Marx offered a more rigorous and scientific approach to understanding society. The fact that ‘traces of the Hegelian influence still remained’ in volume I of Capital, however, led Althusser to suggest that only Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and the Marginal Notes on Wagner, written in the last eight years of his life, were ‘totally and definitively exempt’ from Hegelianism. 126 Althusser offered, therefore, a rupture to the Hegel–Marx connection which gained considerable currency during the 1960s and 1970s in the form of structural Marxism. This expunging of Hegel’s influence from Marx’s thought was meant to allow Marxism to become a more ‘scientific’ discourse. The benefits of Althusser’s anti-Hegelian intervention, however, have been ambiguous, to say the least.127

Recent Developments It was suggested above that, historically, responses to the question of the nature of the intellectual relationship which exists between Hegel and Marx have fallen into just two categories. On the one hand, there are those who have sought, albeit in their different ways, to appropriate at least some of the principles of Hegel’s philosophy, and especially of course the principles of dialectics, for Marxism. These thinkers reject Hegel’s philosophy in so far as they consider it to be a form of idealist metaphysics, and have sought to develop a dialectical approach to the world on some sort of a materialist foundation. On the other hand, there are those who have sought to expunge Hegel’s philosophy in its entirety from Marxism, again because they object strongly to any form of idealist metaphysics, and because they take the view that the Hegelian dialectic is intrinsically associated with such an idealist metaphysics. Consequently, it cannot be appropriated in a materialist manner, as the other main schools of Marxist thought maintain. These two basic approaches to our understanding of the Hegel–Marx connection are alive and well in the debates which are currently taking place in the literature on Hegel and Marx. For example, the idea that Hegel’s thought, suitably modified, might be appropriated by Marxists is clearly to be found in the work of the ‘materialist appropriation’ school.128 This school continues the traditional interpretation of the Hegel–Marx connection which emphasises the need for an inversion of Hegel’s idealist dialectic to render it properly materialist.129 The tendency within this school is to restate Marx’s comments of the ‘rational

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kernel/mystical shell’ variety, and to portray Hegel’s dialectic as steeped in mysticism, yet containing a ‘crypto-materialism’ that can be appropriated for Marxism. 130 Hegel’s discussion of the self-creating power of labour, which he himself grasped only in a mystified form, offers such an implicit materialist basis. 131 Such mystification emanated from Hegel’s apparent emphasis on the self-development of concepts, which he failed to root in the historical development of society. 132 In addition, this approach is keen to emphasise that as regards the notion of contradiction, Hegel always sees the possibility of resolution through thought in the Absolute Idea. In contrast, it is argued that Marx correctly grasps that such contradictions have to be overcome through real historical struggles.133 Consequently, while some defence of Hegel’s philosophy is forthcoming in this approach, in the end Hegel is depicted as being only half-correct, as it were. A separate, though parallel, approach to our understanding of the Hegel–Marx connection, and hence one that might also be said to rest on ‘appropriationist’ foundations, is that associated with one wing of what Christopher Arthur has referred to as the ‘new dialectics’ school of thought.134 As Arthur indicates, the approach to the Hegel–Marx connection advocated by this ‘new dialectics’ school, generally, is ‘new’ in so far as the ‘dialectical materialism’ of Engels is completely rejected and instead a ‘direct appeal to Hegel’ is made as ‘the standard move’. 135 This approach therefore involves an attempt to demonstrate the precise extent to which Marx relies on the use of Hegelian categories and forms of reasoning in his economic writings, and especially of course in Capital. Arthur himself, drawing on the work of Geert Reuten and Michael Williams, makes a direct correlation between the categories in Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital.136 Hegel’s Doctrine of Being, for instance, is shown to parallel Marx’s movement of the commodity from exchange to value, whilst the Doctrine of Essence parallels the ‘doubling of money and commodities’, and the Concept parallels capital ‘positing its actualisation in labour and industry’.137 Despite such a close correlation between the thought of Marx and Hegel, however, Arthur perceives Hegel himself as an idealist, because he ‘treated the fundamental categories of thought as pure categories independent of contingent empirical instantiation’. From Arthur’s point of view, Hegel’s idealism needs to be ‘inverted’, and thereby firmly anchored in a materialist dialectics, before Hegel’s thought can be appropriated by Marxists. Arthur maintains that the value of ‘appropriating Hegel’s logic’ in this way lies in the fact that although Hegel’s categories are abstract, they nevertheless find a direct correspondence in practice through value and the commodity form. 138

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Consequently, even though he is a philosophical ‘idealist’, Hegel’s thought is certainly of value for Marxists. In the end, therefore, despite Arthur’s emphasis on the strong affinities between Hegel’s and Marx’s approaches, his analysis of that relationship still seems to be underpinned by the basic assumptions of the traditional materialist appropriation argument referred to above. Another advocate of the ‘new dialectics’ approach is Tony Smith, whose work has made an important contribution to the effort to demonstrate the similarities between Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital. There is a certain ambivalence regarding the interpretation of Hegel’s thought in Smith’s thinking. It seems clear enough, however, that at least on occasion Smith’s analysis of the Hegel–Marx connection, like Arthur’s, can clearly be seen to rest on quite traditional, ‘appropriationist’ foundations. For example, despite his efforts to demonstrate the very strong affinity between Marx’s work and Hegel’s, Smith takes care to emphasise that even so it would be quite wrong to give the impression that ‘the positions of Hegel and Marx can simply be conflated’. And he insists that there are a number of areas in which ‘Hegel’s “idealism” can legitimately be contrasted with Marx’s “materialism”’. As a result, Smith frequently appears to concur with the traditional view that, precisely because he ‘never leaves the sphere of ideas’, Hegel’s thought remains trapped within the confines of a commitment to an idealist metaphysics. 139 Additionally, the idea that there is a need to expunge all traces of the influence of Hegel from our understanding of Marxism is also to be found in the contemporary literature, specifically in that school of thinking generally known as ‘analytical Marxism’.140 Althusser, in particular, might be said to have laid the foundations for analytical Marxism in three ways. 141 First, he showed that historical materialism was incompatible with Hegelian modes of thought; secondly, he introduced a more systematic interrogation of basic concepts that is symptomatic of the analytical Marxist approach; and thirdly, the failure of his own project suggested that Marxism had no distinctive methodology that separated it from other forms of discourse. 142 Not surprisingly, the acceptance of these arguments has led to the rejection of much of Marx’s thought, despite the attempt to retain some affinity with the term ‘Marxist’. 143 Leaving Hegel behind, and denying that there was anything distinctive about Marx’s method from that of mainstream social science, analytical Marxism has appropriated rational choice theory from orthodox economics and applied it to Marxist theory.144 The attempt therefore to purge any trace of Hegelianism is alive and well.

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There is, however, also to be found a third general approach to our understanding of the Hegel–Marx connection in the contemporary literature. This third approach is relatively novel, although, as we have observed, it might be said to be based on a reading of the thought of Hegel which is at least hinted at in the writings of earlier contributors to the debate, such as Lenin, Lukács and Marcuse. This third approach represents an attempt to get away from the two more traditional lines of argument – that Marxism should either appropriate a modified version of Hegel’s dialectical thought, on the one hand, or that Marxism should reject Hegel’s thought completely, on the other. According to this new line of reasoning, what all the earlier approaches to our understanding of the intellectual relationship between Hegel and Marx have in common, and consequently where they all go wrong, is in their erroneous assumption that whereas Marx is a materialist, Hegel is an idealist. It is argued, here, that whilst this assumption is in one sense correct, at least in so far as it touches on the thought of Marx, nevertheless it is actually quite erroneous in so far as it touches on the thought of Hegel. For Hegel is not an idealist at all. On the contrary, like Marx, Hegel too is a ‘materialist’.145 At first sight such an interpretation appears paradoxical, to say the least. It should be emphasised, therefore, that when those who present it describe Hegel as a ‘materialist’ what they have in mind is not so much Hegel’s general philosophy, or Hegelian metaphysics, but rather Hegel’s economic, social and political thought. This particular interpretation of the intellectual relationship between Hegel and Marx, therefore, rests on what may legitimately be described as a particular ‘non-metaphysical’ or ‘non-philosophical’ reading of Hegel. In this respect it might be said to reflect an ongoing trend in the contemporary literature on Hegel. 146 We have already indicated that a number of commentators have suggested that Marx’s thought generally, and his ‘materialism’ in particular, ought to be interpreted, not so much as a philosophical or metaphysical, but primarily as a socio-historical doctrine. Moreover, the point of making this suggestion is to seek to drive a wedge between Hegel and Marx by demonstrating that, in so far as Marx is concerned, their respective intellectual interests are really quite different from one another. From this standpoint, Hegel’s thought is of little relevance for our understanding of Marx’s precisely because Hegel is a philosopher and a metaphysician, whereas Marx is a social and political theorist who sees himself, from 1844 onwards, as going beyond or attempting to transcend or realise ‘philosophy’. Hence, on this view, it is not at all helpful to consider

Introduction

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Marx’s thought as representing a materialist ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s metaphysical beliefs. There are two possible ways of resisting this conclusion. One is to maintain, as ‘orthodox’ Marxism (following Engels) has traditionally done, that Marx is in fact a philosopher after all. He, too, is committed to a certain framework of metaphysical beliefs, albeit of a materialist rather than an idealist type. The other is to maintain, as the view which we are presently considering does, that, just as in the case of Marx, it is actually wrong to think of Hegel too, as being primarily a philosopher or a metaphysician. In so far as he is of significance for the history of Marxism, the true importance of Hegel, on this view, is to be found in his social and political thought, or in what is usually referred to as his Realphilosophie, rather than in his general philosophy or his metaphysics. 147 According to this reading of the Hegel–Marx connection, the germs of such a ‘materialist’ interpretation of Hegel are to be found in some of the works of Lenin, Lukács and Marcuse, albeit ambiguously. As we have seen in the case of one interpretation of Lenin’s Notebooks, Hegel’s Science of Logic, is treated as a materialist rather than an idealist text. Advocates of this third interpretation suggest, therefore, that Lenin understands Hegel as in fact already some kind of ‘materialist’, and it is for precisely this reason that he is of interest to Marxists and important for the history of Marxism.148 From this point of view, then, there is no need for Marxists to appropriate a modified, materialist version of Hegel’s philosophical idealism into their own thought. For Marx’s ‘materialism’ can be derived directly from Hegel’s own social thought without any such adaptation or modification. From this standpoint, rather than claim that Marx is in some important sense a ‘Hegelian’, it would be more accurate for us to claim, paradoxical though it might seem, that it is Hegel who is in some important sense the first ‘Marxist’. In this way writers like David MacGregor – whose views do represent something of a departure in the history of our understanding of the relationship between Hegel and Marx, at least in the sense that they emphasise the importance of something the significance of which has not so far been sufficiently appreciated by others – are nevertheless able to claim support for their own interpretation of that relationship in the works of a more traditional and more authoritative source such as Lenin. In the case of Lukács, we noted previously how a ‘materialist’ reading of Hegel is to be found in The Young Hegel. However, this interpretation is not fully developed there, and in this work Lukács’ hint that Hegel might fruitfully be read in such a way sits uncomfortably with a much

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more conventional reading which sees Hegel primarily as a philosopher and a proponent of an idealist metaphysics. Indeed, in the light of the interpretation of Hegel which is offered in The Young Hegel by the later Lukács, History and Class Consciousness itself might be seen not as a ‘Hegelian’, but, on the contrary, as a thoroughly ‘non-Hegelian’ or even ‘anti-Hegelian’ text. The new interpretation of Hegel as a thoroughgoing ‘materialist’ (albeit of an ‘historical’ rather than a ‘metaphysical’ kind), when conjoined with the claim that it is precisely as such that Hegel’s thought is of interest to students of Marx and the history of Marxism, amounts not only to a reassessment regarding the nature of Hegel’s contribution to Marxism, but also to an upgrading of Hegel’s importance for that history. However, Lukács makes no effort himself to resolve the contradiction which he has discerned in the thought of Hegel. This insight remains, therefore, undeveloped in Lukács’ own thought. Similar remarks might also be made in respect of Marcuse. As we saw earlier, Marcuse, like Lukács, praises the social theory which Hegel develops in his early Jena Realphilosophie for its ‘realism’. Moreover, Marcuse seeks to establish a direct link between Hegel and Marx with respect to questions of social theory and political economy. At the same time, however, just as in the case of Lukács, Marcuse is unwilling to present any systematic interpretation of Hegel as a ‘materialist’, precisely because he considers such an interpretation to be inconsistent with his recognition that Hegel subscribes to an idealist form of metaphysics. Consequently, as Colletti has rightly pointed out, throughout Reason and Revolution, Marcuse simply ‘cannot make up his mind if Hegel is to be depicted as an idealist or as a materialist’. 149 As a result, there is a fundamental inconsistency in Marcuse’s own thought with respect to this issue, just as there is in Lukács’. Moreover, like Lukács, this is an inconsistency which Marcuse makes no attempt whatsoever to resolve. From the standpoint of the new ‘materialist’ reading of Hegel, then, even those commentators who have been most forceful and the most extreme in emphasising the importance of Hegel for our understanding of Marx’s thought, such as Lukács and Marcuse, have, generally speaking, either not properly understood or not sufficiently emphasised the true significance of Hegel’s thought for the history of Marxism. The fundamental claim that is made by this new reading of the Hegel–Marx connection is, therefore, that Hegel’s dialectic and Marx’s dialectic are one and the same. The historical opposition between idealism and materialism, and the influence which it has had upon our understanding of the intellectual relationship between Hegel and Marx is, on this reading, overcome by stressing the thoroughgoing ‘materialism’ of

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Hegel’s own dialectic. As David MacGregor has pointed out, the basic claim made by this interpretation of Hegel and Marx is that Hegel’s Idea is not ‘mystical’ at all, but is ‘actually the product and instrument of real, living human beings’.150 Individual human beings are the mediation between the abstract concept and its existence in society, which allows Hegel to unite theory and practice and not keep them distinct. 151 Consequently, neither a materialist appropriation of Hegel’s alleged ‘idealist’ form of dialectic nor a complete rejection of Hegel’s dialectic is required for Marxism. This is so simply because the dialectic of Hegel is, as a matter of fact, the materialist dialectic of Marx.

Summary of Contents The contributors to this volume seek to re-examine the Hegel–Marx connection we have just delineated in different ways. Some question the significance of the intellectual relationship between Hegel and Marx, or even deny that such a relationship exists. Others emphasise the strong links between the thought of these two great thinkers, though they might disagree on the precise nature of these links. Chapters 2 and 3 by Terrell Carver and Joseph McCarney, respectively, deal with the Hegel–Marx connection in a very general way. Carver is opposed to the ‘orthodox’ Marxist interpretation of the relationship. Applying some of the insights provided by recent poststructuralist or postmodernist philosophy, he explores the idea that our understanding of the intellectual relationship between Hegel and Marx might be seen as nothing more than a ‘narrative construct’. According to Carver, Engels is a key figure here, largely because he was the person who first created this ‘narrative’ – a ‘narrative’ which was to become ‘standard’, and which has dominated our perception of the Hegel–Marx relationship from the late nineteenth century onwards. Carver suggests that it would be fruitful for us to attempt to look at the relationship between Hegel and Marx anew, quite independently of any assumptions about that relationship which we may have inherited from Engels. He suggests that, as a ‘reading strategy’, there is a case to be made for expunging or ‘divorcing Hegel from Marx almost completely’, just to see ‘what Marx looks like, without him’. Carver also suggests, however, that if we were to adopt such a strategy, then the appropriate conclusion at which to arrive would be that there is actually no case for attempting to eliminate Hegel altogether from our understanding of Marx’s thought. Joseph McCarney argues that Hegel and Marx share a commitment to what is fundamentally the same ‘project’, namely the development of a

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‘dialectical theory in the service of human freedom’. According to McCarney the similarities between Hegel and Marx are even more striking than Marx himself would have us believe. An important feature of McCarney’s essay is the fact that it recognises that the thought of Hegel might be interpreted in different ways, and that this leads to different possible understandings of the Hegel–Marx connection. McCarney points out that, in his explicit comments on Hegel, Marx usually offers a ‘transcendent’ reading of Hegel’s thought – a reading that sees Hegel as being primarily interested in questions of ontology and metaphysics. This leads Marx to miss certain aspects of Hegel’s thought which are of vital importance for Marxism, notably Hegel’s emphasis on the idea that what he refers to as ‘Spirit’ is something which manifests itself ‘in human consciousness and society’ – something which expresses itself in ‘human life’. According to McCarney, therefore, Marx fails to appreciate that Hegel’s central theme is the idea that the world of ‘Spirit’ is actually ‘co-extensive with, and exhausted by, the realm of human consciousness and action’. Had he appreciated this, Marx would have been much less hostile towards Hegel and Hegelianism in his earlier writings. The next two chapters focus specifically on Marx’s economic thought, and especially on the ‘method’ which Marx adopted in his study of political economy. Tony Burns (chapter 4) takes up the suggestion that it is fruitful for us to consider what a ‘non-Hegelian’ reading of Marx would look like, as this will help us to establish the precise nature of Hegel’s contribution to Marx’s views on scientific method in the sphere of political economy. This chapter is devoted to a consideration of the view, put forward by both Marxists and non-Marxists, that Marx owes much more to David Ricardo than he does to Hegel. In response to this, Christopher Arthur (chapter 5) depicts Marx as a thoroughgoing ‘Hegelian’ in so far as questions of method are concerned. Writing from the standpoint of the ‘new dialectics’ school, Arthur seeks to demonstrate in a systematic manner the precise extent of Marx’s debt to Hegel in the compilation of his major work, Capital. As in the case of the other members of this school, Arthur presents a persuasive argument in support of the view that Marx consistently employs the categories of Hegel’s ‘logic’ when developing his argument in Capital, and especially in volume I. The next five essays concentrate on a variety of different subjects. Each considers the extent to which an understanding of Hegel’s ideas helps us to understand the development of Marx’s own thinking on the subject in question. Gary Browning (chapter 6) deals with the early

Introduction

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Marx’s attitude towards questions of philosophy. His contribution is rare in that it focuses on a relatively neglected topic which is discussed in one of Marx’s earliest works, namely Marx’s treatment of the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus in his doctoral dissertation. Browning seeks to establish that Marx’s analysis of the respective philosophies of these two thinkers is undertaken from the standpoint of an unqualified ‘Hegelian’ and that, consequently, the doctoral dissertation provides us with ‘important evidence of Marx’s subscription to a Hegelian style of theorising’ at this time. For example, in the dissertation, Marx clearly ‘employs categories and a style of conceptual explanation drawn from Hegel’s Logic’. According to Browning, Marx’s ‘deployment of Hegelian argumentative techniques’ in the dissertation represents the first systematic use by Marx of the particular style of theorising which also clearly informs ‘his later, more famous works’. For example, Marx’s employment of these techniques in the dissertation can prefigure, in a striking way, the method of argument which Marx later employs in the Grundrisse, ‘whose arguments run along similar lines’. Ian Fraser (chapter 7) focuses on issues in social theory, and specifically on the attitude adopted by Hegel and Marx towards questions relating to the notion of ‘human needs’. Fraser argues that, again, there are striking similarities between the respective approaches Hegel and Marx adopt when discussing such questions. An interesting aspect of Fraser’s essay is its discussion of Hegel’s attitude towards the principle of the ‘division of labour’ and its operation in the ‘civil society’ of his day. This aspect of Hegel’s social thought touches on those questions traditionally discussed in the classic texts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political economy. Fraser seeks to demonstrate that Hegel’s social thought might itself be considered to be a significant contribution to the history of political economy, a contribution which, Fraser suggests, clearly prefigures Marx’s early writings. In this way, Fraser’s essay is a contribution to the most recent interpretation of the Hegel–Marx connection, which sees Hegel as a significant forerunner of Marx, in the sense that he was himself an early proponent of a social theory which clearly rests on ‘materialist’ foundations.152 The next two chapters, in their different ways, deal with Marx’s views on history. Andrew Chitty (chapter 8) focuses on the famous Preface to Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Central to this is the notion of ‘social relations of production’. Chitty attempts to explicate what Marx means by this term. It is, he points out, often believed that when Marx talks about ‘social relations of production’ what he has in mind are legal property relations. The problem with

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such an assumption is that if we interpret Marx in this way, then we are immediately confronted with what Chitty refers to as the ‘problem of legality’. Such a reading of Marx appears to commit him to some form of circular argument. For if social relations of production are property relations, then they cannot be a part of a society’s economic base, but must be a part of its legal superstructure. However, if this is so, then the account of history that Marx provides in the Preface must be considered to be logically incoherent. While broadly sympathetic to G. A. Cohen’s attempt to defend Marx against the charge of logical incoherence by defining the concept of ‘social relations of production’ in a non-legalistic manner, 153 Chitty is nevertheless quite critical of the way in which Cohen carries out this project. As an alternative Chitty suggests that a more fruitful approach is to see these relations of production as being analogous in Marx’s thought to those relationships of ‘mutual recognition’ which Hegel (following Fichte) refers to both in his Phenomenology of Mind and in The Philosophy of Right. Howard Williams (chapter 9) also focuses on the views which Hegel and Marx adopt towards history. These are often presented as being radically different from one another – the reason being, it is usually suggested, that Hegel and Marx are committed to metaphysical beliefs which are fundamentally opposed. On this traditional reading of the Hegel–Marx connection, Hegel is an ‘idealist’ in so far as questions of metaphysics are concerned, whereas Marx is a ‘materialist’. Williams attempts to question these traditional assumptions by drawing out some of the more obvious similarities which exist between Hegel and Marx in so far as their views on history are concerned. The final essay, by David Boucher, although also touching on history, deals primarily with the normative questions of political theory, and specifically the views of Hegel and Marx in so far as these have an application to the political theory of international relations. Boucher points out that in the current literature the views of Hegel and Marx are usually considered to be diametrically opposed. Hegel’s thought is generally considered to be dominated by the principle of ‘communitarianism’. On this reading, Hegel maintains that all ethical principles are and must inevitably be rooted in the customs and traditions of particular historical communities. Thus, Hegel is considered to be some sort of moral or ethical ‘relativist’. In contrast to this, Boucher maintains, Marx is often thought of as being an adherent of the opposing principle of ‘cosmopolitanism’. He is, therefore, traditionally presented as someone who is committed to the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘universal’

Introduction

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or ‘cosmopolitan’ morality, which ought to regulate the conduct of both individuals and states with respect to one another. These interpretations, Boucher maintains, are partial and one-sided, for each of these thinkers subscribes to certain principles which, according to the interpretations in question, are usually associated with the other. Boucher argues that both Hegel and Marx are more properly to be described as ‘historicists’. They each subscribe to the view that although there are indeed certain universal ethical principles, nevertheless these always manifest themselves in different ways in different societies and in different historical epochs. These principles are, therefore, historically conditioned and must, as a result, always be seen as ‘historically developing’

Notes 1 S. Hook, From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), p. 15. 2 L. S. Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. ix–x. 3 Stepelevich, The Young Hegelians, p. 1. 4 D. McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 18. 5 McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, p. 19. 6 Quoted in McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, p. 19. 7 Stepelevich, The Young Hegelians, p. 13. 8 D. McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 42. 9 Stepelevich, The Young Hegelians, p. 13. 10 Stepelevich, The Young Hegelians, p. 13. 11 Stepelevich, The Young Hegelians, p. 13. 12 K. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, in K. Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 80. 13 K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Marx, Early Writings, p. 386. 14 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, pp. 386 and 385. 15 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 384. 16 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 385. 17 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 384. 18 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in Marx, Early Writings, pp. 421–3. 19 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, p. 423. 20 K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 93. After Marx’s death, Engels indicated that Marx had left this ‘outline of dialectics’ amongst his manuscripts. The outline, however, never appeared. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, 47 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993), p. 3. 21 K. Marx, Grundrisse (London: Pelican Books, 1973), p. 85.

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22 23 24 25 26 27

Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 100–1. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101. See, for example, D. McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (Macmillan: London, 1973), p. 304; R. Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital (London: Pluto Press, 1977), pp. xii–xiii; T. Carver, ‘Commentary’, in Karl Marx: Texts on Method (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), pp. 112–16, and ‘Marx – and Hegel’s Logic’, Political Studies, XXIV, 1 (1976); A. Oakley, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Intellectual Sources and Evolution, Volume 1: 1844–1860 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 145–7. Carver, Texts on Method, p. 115. Oakley, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, pp. 146–7. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 151. L. Wilde, Marx and Contradiction (Aldershot: Avebury, 1989), p. 59. K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), p. 102. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 102. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 103. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 100. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 102 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 102. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 100. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 102–3. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 103. F. Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976); F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, in two volumes (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), Vol. II; F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II. D. MacGregor, Hegel and Marx After the Fall of Communism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), pp. 1, 25, 9, xvi. see also D. MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx (Toronto & Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1990). For Marxism generally during the period of the Second International, see L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 2, The Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); D. McLellan, Marxism after Marx (London: Macmillan, 1979). Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, pp. 358–9. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, pp. 369–70. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, pp. 373, 375. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 387. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 363. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, pp. 372, 387. Marx himself makes strikingly similar comments in the well-known ‘Afterword’ to the second German edition of volume one of Capital. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, pp. 370, 363, 377, 387. For Engels’ source see, again, Marx’s ‘Afterword’. Engels attribution of ‘reflection’ theory to Hegel is relatively unusual. For a discussion of this issue, see L. Colletti, ‘Hegel and the “Theory of Reflection”’, in L. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel (London: Verso,

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46 47 48

49

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50 51 52 53

54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64 65 66 67 68

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1973); and H. S. Harris, ‘Hegel’s Correspondence Theory of Truth’, in G. Browning, ed., Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997). There are also some relevant comments in G. Lukács, The Young Hegel (London: Merlin Press, 1975), pp. 435, 531–3; G. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, Vol. 1, Hegel (London: Merlin Press, 1978), pp. 78–80; and Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 25, 64–5. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 387. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 363. L. Colletti, ‘Introduction’ to K. Marx, Early Writings, ed. L. Colletti (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 10. See the writings collected in G. V. Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, in five volumes, III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976). Kolakowski’s view that Plekhanov’s ‘picture of Hegel is mainly taken from Engels’, and ‘seems to be based on fragmentary and cursory reading’ of the works of Hegel himself, is open to criticism. See Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 2, p. 337. For the (persuasive) argument that Engels’ authority was challenged by both Italian and French Marxists as early as the 1890s, see R. Jacoby, ‘The Marxism of Hegel and Engels’, in R. Jacoby, Dialectic of Defeat, pp. 44–57, esp. pp. 53–4; also fn. 132, p. 152. See also N. Levine, Dialogue within the Dialectic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 26–7, 28–45. A. Labriola, Essays on the Materialist Conception of History (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1908), and Socialism & Philosophy (St. Louis: Telos, 1980 [1898]). B. Croce, What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel? (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969 [1912]). J. Jaurès, Studies in Socialism (London: Independent Labour Party, 1906, [1901]), p. 74. Jaurès, Studies in Socialism, pp. 43–4. Jaurès, Studies in Socialism, p. 70. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972). V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, in Collected Works, Volume 38 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1963). Lichtheim, From Marx to Hegel, p. 4. For this view see also J. Hoffman, Marxism and the Theory of Praxis (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975); D. H. Ruben, Marxism and Materialism: A Study in Marxist Theory of Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979); and S. Sayers, Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). MacGregor, Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx, p. 4; On this theme and for the depiction of Lenin as the first Hegelian Marxist, see K. Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995). For some incisive criticisms of Anderson’s thesis see the review by Sean Sayers, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 34 (Autumn/Winter, 1996), pp. 72–6. Lenin, ‘Philosophical Notebooks’, p. 234. Lenin, ‘Philosophical Notebooks’, p. 276. Lenin, ‘Philosophical Notebooks’, pp. 360, 212. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 3–4. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 17.

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69 70 71 72 73

Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 17–18. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 17. Merquior, Western Marxism, p. 74. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 24, n. 6. Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1966, [1923]) considered some of the themes developed by Lukács. Korsch’s legacy for our assessment of the Hegel–Marx connection, however, is only tangential because despite all his ‘Hegel-worship’ he quickly abandoned any Hegelian hue for a more ‘empirical-minded social science’ form of Marxism. Merquior, Western Marxism, p. 86. G. Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relation Between Dialectics and Economics, (Merlin: London, 1975). Lukács, The Young Hegel, pp. 564–5. Lukács, The Young Hegel, pp. 72, 98. See also p. 127. Lukács, The Young Hegel, p. 362. Lukács, The Young Hegel, pp. 338, 370. See also pp. 348, 351, 357, 384–5, 466. Lukács, The Young Hegel, pp. 562, 565. Lukács, The Young Hegel, pp. 565, 562. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). Gramsci, Selections, p. 426. Gramsci, Selections, p. 402. Gramsci, Selections, p. 402. Gramsci, Selections, p. 402. Gramsci, Selections, p. 396. Gramsci, Selections, p. 396. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 103. For a history and overview of the main members, see D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1980). Marcuse, Reason and Revolution. Marcuse was the most notable member of the Frankfurt School to draw out the positive implications of Hegel’s thought for Marxism. In contrast, other members, such as Adorno, were later to offer a far more critical stance towards Hegel’s philosophy, the main tenets of which Adorno sought to invert, to avoid Hegel’s supposed preoccupation of philosophising ‘out of . . . concrete things’ to ensure and promote order within his system. T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 33. For a critique of Adorno’s reading of Hegel, see G. Rose, ‘From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking – Hegel and Adorno’, in Judaism & Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). See the section entitled ‘From Philosophy to Social Theory’ and ‘The Negation of Philosophy’, Reason and Revolution, pp. 251–7, 258–62. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 314. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 60 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 28. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 184. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 258. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 293. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

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99 See M. Kelly, Hegel in France (Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Language Publications, 1992); cf. B. Baugh, ‘Limiting Reason’s Empire: The Early Reception of Hegel in France’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, XXX1, 2, 1993, who argues that the emphasis on the Phenomenology was a reaction to the earlier response amongst French intellectuals to Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. 100 Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. III, p. 177. 101 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 258. 102 H. Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1961, [1938]). 103 Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, pp. 47–8. 104 Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, p. 60. 105 J. Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel (London: Heinemann, 1969). 106 J.-P. Sartre, ‘Materialism and Revolution’, in Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York, Criterion Books, 1955). 107 J.-P. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, (London: New Left Books, 1960), p. 712. 108 J.-P. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason; A. Wood, ‘Hegel and Marxism’, in F. C. Beiser ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 415. 109 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 24. 110 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 36. 111 E. Bernstein, The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy, translated as Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), pp. 209–14, 222–3. 112 Bernstein, Presuppositions, p. 210. 113 Bernstein, Presuppositions, p. 211. 114 Bernstein, Presuppositions, p. 212. 115 Bernstein, Presuppositions, p. 223. 116 G. Della Volpe, Logic as a Positive Science (London: New Left Books, 1980 [1950 and 1956]). 117 Della Volpe, Logic as a Positive Science, p. 108. 118 Della Volpe, Logic as a Positive Science, p. 217. 119 L. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 51. 120 Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, p. 51 121 Cf. Colletti, ‘Hegel and the “Dialectic of Matter”’, and ‘Hegel and Dialectical Materialism’, both in Marxism and Hegel, pp. 7–27, 40–51. 122 Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, p. 192. 123 Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, p. 49. 124 There is a clear affinity between the thought of Colletti and that of Bernstein in this regard. For this see L. Colletti, ‘Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International’, in From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 72–6. 125 L. Althusser, For Marx (London: New Left Books, 1977). 126 L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New Left Books: London, 1971), p. 90. As Kolakowski wryly observes: ‘At this point we begin to wonder if Marxism existed at all in Marx’s day, or whether it was left to Althusser to invent it.’ Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. III, p. 486. 127 Merquior, Western Marxism, pp. 152–3. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. III, p. 486. McLellan, Marxism After Marx, pp. 302–4, are all openly

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128 129 130

131 132

133 134

135 136 137 138 139

140 141 142 143 144

Ian Fraser and Tony Burns critical. Even a sympathiser such as Callinicos ultimately refers to Althusser’s contribution to Marxism as one of ‘destruction’. Callinicos, Marxism and Philosophy, p. 95. Ironically, the recent posthumous publication of Althusser’s early writings depicts Hegel far more sympathetically. Moreover, Althusser’s emphasis on the radical nature of Hegel’s thought may suggest that we need to impose a ‘break’ between the writings of the ‘young’ Althusser compared to the ‘old’, as he did for Marx. See L. Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings (London & New York: Verso, 1997). For a useful overview, see G. Boger, ‘On the Materialist Appropriation of Hegel’s Dialectical Method’, Science and Society, 55, 1 (Spring 1991). Boger, ‘On the Materialist Appropriation of Hegel’s Dialectical Method’, p. 27. A trait evidenced in Boger’s approach. See ‘On the Materialist Appropriation’, pp. 47–9. For the recent iconoclastic suggestion that it is Hegel’s mysticism that is of value to Marx, particularly in his discussion of money, see J. Rosenthal, The Myth of Dialectics: Reinterpreting the Marx–Hegel Relation (London: Macmillan, 1998). Boger, ‘On the Materialist Appropriation’, pp. 54–5. See, for example, P. Mattick, Jr., ‘Marx’s Dialectic’, in F. Moseley, ed., Marx’s Method in Capital: A Reexamintion (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 132; J. Rees, The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 112. Rees, The Algebra of Revolution, Ch. 2; L. Wilde, Marx and Contradiction (Aldershot: Avebury, 1989), Chs. 2 and 6. Coined by C. Arthur, ‘Review of Shamsavari’s Dialectics and Social Theory: The Logic of Marx’s Capital’, Capital & Class, 50 (1993). For the ‘new dialectics’, school see C. Arthur, ‘Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital’, in Moseley, ed., Marx’s Method in Capital: A Reexamintion (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993); G. Reuten and M. Williams, Value-Form and the State (London & New York: Routledge, 1989); A. Shamsavari, Dialectics and Social Theory: The Logic of Capital (Braunton: Merlin, 1991); T. Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital: Replies to Hegelian Criticisms (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990). Arthur, ‘Review of Shamsavari’s Dialectics and Social Theory, p. 175. Arthur, ‘Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital’, pp. 65–6, 71–2. Arthur, ‘Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital’, p. 65. Arthur, ‘Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital’, pp. 63, 73. Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital, p. 40. Ironically, John Rees has suggested that Smith himself does in the end conflate the views of Hegel and Marx. Consequently, Smith presents an interpretation of Marx’s method in Capital which, according to Rees, transforms Marx himself into a philosophical ‘idealist’. See Rees, The Algebra of Revolution, pp. 108–11. J. Roemer, ed., Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). A Callinicos, ‘Introduction: Analytical Marxism’, in A. Callinicos, ed., Marxist Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 5. Callinicos, ‘Introduction: Analytical Marxism’, p. 5. J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 531. A. Carling, ‘Rational Choice Marxism’, New Left Review, 160, (November/ December 1986), pp. 26–7.

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145 Recent works in which this reading is developed in a systematic way include D. MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx (London & Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984); D. MacGregor, Hegel and Marx After the Fall of Communism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998); and I. Fraser, ‘Two of a Kind: Hegel, Marx, Dialectic and Form’, Capital & Class, 61 (1997). As Christopher Arthur points out in his contribution to this volume, elements of this approach are also to be found in the work of Tony Smith, and Geert Reuten and Michael Williams, who might be said to constitute a second wing of the ‘new dialectics’ school. There is, however, as we have already noted, an ambivalence in Smith’s reading of Hegel. For Smith does not by any means consistently interpret Hegel as a ‘materialist’. The value of a ‘materialist’ reading of Hegel is also indicated in the more recent work of Joseph McCarney, as is clear from McCarney’s contribution to the present volume. 146 For this see K. Hartmann, ‘Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View’, in K. Hartmann, Studies in Foundational Philosophy (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1988); also H. T. Engelhardt and T. Pinkard, eds, Hegel Reconsidered: Beyond Metaphysics and the Authoritarian State (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994); F. C. Beiser, ‘Hegel, A Non-Metaphysician? A Polemic’, in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 32 (Autumn/Winter 1995), pp. 1–13; T. Pinkard, ‘What is the Non-Metaphysical Reading of Hegel? A Reply to Frederick Beiser’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 34 (Autumn/ Winter 1996), pp. 13–20; F. C. Beiser, ‘Response to Pinkard’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 34 (Autumn/Winter 1996), pp. 21–6. 147 For a discussion of Hegel’s Realphilosophie, see Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, pp. 87–109; G. Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics (London: Merlin Press, 1975), pp. 319–37; Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 77–80. The idea that there is more than one ‘Hegel’, just as there is more than one ‘Marx’, and that the interpretation of Hegel’s thought which one adopts, and especially one’s choice of key texts, for example the Phenomenology, on the one hand, or the Logic on the other, will greatly influence one’s reading of the Hegel–Marx connection, is suggested by Jacoby. Cf. Dialectic of Defeat, pp. 37–9. 148 The view that, at least on occasion, this is Lenin’s understanding of Hegel is suggested by Lukács in The Young Hegel, pp. 6, 98, 338, 348–9, 351. 149 Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, p. 62. 150 MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx, pp. 20–1. 151 MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx, p. 21. 152 That Hegel might be read in this way is also suggested by B. Cullen in his Hegel’s Social and Political Thought: An Introduction (London: Gill & Macmillan, 1979), p. 32, and by S. Avineri, in his Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 94. However, neither Cullen nor Avineri makes any systematic attempt to develop the idea that Hegel might be interpreted as a ‘materialist’; or do they employ this term in their respective analyses of Hegel’s thought. 153 G. A. Cohen in his Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

2 Hegel and Marx: Reflections on the Narrative Terrell Carver

Whose Hegel? Which Marx? Hegel and Marx did not just happen. Nor are they like Gilbert and Sullivan, Beaumont and Fletcher, or even Marx and Engels. They never met and they never corresponded (Hegel died when Marx was 13). Marx referred many times in his voluminous works to Hegel, but then he also referred to an enormous number of writers – an almost unbelievable number. If there were a citation count, it is possible that Hegel would win, at least amongst philosophers, though this would hardly do more than start a discussion on why this is important and what it is supposed to mean. If Marx is to be linked up (or married off?) philosophically, there are alternative candidates – Aristotle is one.1 But then it seems to me that Marx constantly draws on the early nineteenth-century remnants of medieval and early-modern ‘school philosophy’, deploying distinctions such as essence–appearance, motion–stasis, potential–actual, quantity– quality, and no doubt many others, without citing any particular author or source. I will be exploring these issues and others, in both philosophy and politics, as my aim is to stand back from the Hegel–Marx pairing as it has been transmitted to us, and to try to get it into a new perspective. I shall be arguing the following, hoping to clarify with complexity: • The Hegel–Marx pairing is a construct or narrative, not a conceptual reflection of a ‘fact’ that cannot be other than it has come down to us through the literature. • Hegel’s work is rather different in different texts, and the texts themselves changed over time in terms of what they were thought to say, and how important individual items in the corpus were supposed to be. 34

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• Hegel as a figure has meant different things to different people politically at different times, including our own. • Marx and Engels had rather different views about Hegel and his texts at different times, and in my view, they are most interestingly regarded as two different people whose exact agreement cannot always be assumed. • The most productive use of Hegel in scrutinising Marx is the most specific citation, linking text to text, and sticking to what is peculiarly ‘Hegelian’ about Hegel, and I aim to provide an example of that. • The least productive use of Hegel in scrutinising Marx is the most general overarching type of contextual claim that presumes a timeless Hegel ever-present as such in each text and for each reader. • There is a case for divorcing Hegel from Marx almost completely as a reading strategy just to see what Marx looks like without him, and there is no case for presuming that Marx must always be viewed in a ‘Hegelian’ context. It does not follow that this strategy of ‘minimising Hegel’ coincides with the rational choice Marxist reading (in Jon Elster’s hands), which substitutes positivist presumptions as the only alternative to what is said to be ‘Hegelian’, construed in pejorative ways. ‘Minimising Hegel’ as a strategy leaves open the possibility of putting him back in, if doing so produces a Marx that readers find interesting and productive. The Hegel–Marx pairing, and the familiar ‘contextualisation’ that goes along with it, is a narrative – a construct. It is not a chronicle of ‘what happened’ (as if that kind of narrative were ever ‘objective’ and uncontroversial), but rather an even more tenuous interpretative move. It was created by a particular person, at a particular time, for particular reasons, in a particular way, and it has been taken up by others and repeated or reinterpreted for varying reasons. 2 That is all fair enough and just what one might expect, but as a reading strategy, it has attained a certain majesty as ‘what is’. We have forgotten that it was made up and, of course, as usual, we forget that we forgot. G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History: A Defence is the locus classicus for this kind of unconscious, or at least uncommunicative, presumption that Hegel and Marx are forever joined as a Holy Family. Cohen’s opening chapter, ‘Images of History in Hegel and Marx’, just begins the Hegel– Marx story without prelude or question. Cohen identifies Hegel with ‘German philosophy’, outlines what he takes to be Hegel’s philosophy

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of history, and then tells us that Marx (amongst others) was ‘captured’ by this vision. Thus in Cohen there is really no discussion of the Hegel– Marx relationship as if it could possibly be problematic or even very complex or varied, and his conclusion is suitably simple: ‘We said that Marx’s conception of history preserves the structure of Hegel’s but endows it with fresh content.’3 I think that there is really rather more to say than that.

Citing Hegel Politically Marx had an intellectual relationship with Hegel of great complexity, and it unfolded as he read and reread, remembered and revisited the texts. We have a record of this, of sorts, in the textual citations and allusions that Marx produced. Hegel, however, was rather larger than the sum of his published texts (some of them edited up from lecture notes by his students during Marx’s lifetime). He was adopted by various political factions, given varying interpretations to match, and frequently deployed discursively in what passed at the time for political contexts. Thus there were not only many Hegels, but also a vague omnipresence, on which Marx – and anyone else – could draw. References to Hegel could mean something very general and topical, and something quite specific and scholarly. Needless to say, it is not always clear from surviving texts what to make of the Hegelian discourses in which Marx participated – along with a great many others, which may have been more to do with other ideas, other thinkers, other problems, than with Hegel, writ large or writ small. 4 As indicated above, it may be that in citing Hegel or Hegelian thought Marx is really drawing on ideas that Hegel and Hegelians already had in common with previous philosophers, and which, in the manner of immanent critique, both Hegel and Hegelians, and also Marx, accepted and rejected in suitably complex ways. In other words, for Marx, Hegel and Hegelians were conveniently to hand as repositories of ideas that actually came from elsewhere. As many of these scholastic ideas are now somewhat strange to us, I think that there is often a tendency to assume that they are peculiarly ‘Hegelian’, or that the peculiarly Hegelian reading is the one referenced by Marx or his contemporaries – but this is not necessarily the case. It just looks that way to us. As Hegel aimed to recapitulate and rearticulate all previous philosophy (and history, science, etc.), he was a useful source on ‘knowledge’ up to his own time. Indeed he wrote longer and shorter encyclopaedias, which were his idea of popularisations. But if this divergence between


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Hegel and his predecessors is not explicitly investigated, we can easily end up with an over-Hegelianised and over-philosophised Marx – or at least so it seems to me. It is quite difficult to break out of this particular hermeneutic, as German-language commentators cite Hegel rather in the way I am suggesting that Marx did – in a larger context, and as part of a familiar tradition. For English-language commentators Hegel is a great (and in analytical circles unmentionable) ‘other’, a ‘difficult’ philosopher not in the analytical or empirical tradition, and a special hurdle, so it emerges, that must be surmounted, before the postulant can tackle Marx. Metaphorically, those in the English-speaking world are always advised and warned when ‘Continental’ philosophy looms ahead, as if in a fog on the far side of the Channel. In the 1830s and 1840s in the German kingdoms and princely states, politics was necessarily an elite affair conducted in code, that is, in so far as politics tended towards anything like criticism, rather than adulation and confirmation of traditionalist rule. These states were nonconstitutional, authoritarian regimes, sometimes with ‘consultative’ representative bodies, but no genuinely free press, no interest in public mobilisation of opinion (unless suitably obsequious), and they were overtly intolerant, albeit somewhat inefficient in terms of surveillance and repression. Such toleration of free expression as there was tended to be confined to the universities, and from time to time these were purged amid resistance. As the self-professed foundation of these states was historico-theological, mythologies were essential, analytical enquiry considered subversive and religion at the heart of authority. Any form of philosophy that touched on the great questions of existence was susceptible to criticism from doctrinal Christians, and the ambiguous and coded language of Hegel and his school was an unsurprising result, given the atmosphere of narrow-minded bigotry. Hegelian language is deliberately difficult to interpret for political reasons, not just philosophical ones. Moreover it is a philosophy, not just because the thinkers were that way inclined, but because any critical consideration of society would have to take place in a suitably circumscribed and abstract frame. The curious crossover between philosophy, theology and politics that Hegel attempted was itself a political move in about the only way possible for him, yet still allowing access to publishers and a livelihood. This political streak, coupled with a necessary ambiguity, is something that commentators do not necessarily appreciate today, as by the 1860s public life in something like the modern sense had emerged in Germany. By contrast, in the 1830s and 1840s, philosophy lectures and

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philosophy books were the political currency which intellectuals could safely (at least more or less safely) exchange. David Friedrich Strauss, of course, lost his job at Tübingen, and was chased out of Switzerland, for writing a book about the historical Jesus, and Ludwig Feuerbach never worked at a university again after publishing his doctoral dissertation ‘Reflections on Death and Immortality’, which was taken to be atheistic.5 So there were limits on what could be thought, published, analysed and questioned, even in universities, never mind in wider circles and the media. That Hegel was easily subjected to both conservative and liberal readings was hardly an accidental authorial strategy. He became a great philosopher and attained the highest levels of state-sponsored academic achievement. But, as is well known, there were two distinctly different readings of his oeuvre, dividing along political lines. Before the 1850s a ‘Hegel–Marx’ narrative would have looked odd or otiose. Of course, Marx was involved with Hegel, as who in a political context was not. But then, Marx’s involvement was within the Young Hegelians, or rather on the edge of them – or so he chose to place himself. Marx was rather lucky to have met up with the one Young Hegelian who would really suit him – Engels – as Engels was both clear on the atheism issue, having no truck with mystical pantheism and woollyminded humanism, and also far-seeing about technology, being really taken with practical activities connected with wealth, or the lack of it, and with industrial productivity, and exploitation. 6 None of the others had those attractive qualities, and lacking Engels, Marx may well have stayed at the margin in terms of publicity and impact, being even less effective than he was. Once past 1848 and into the 1850s a Hegel–Marx narrative was a necessity, as the politics of Hegelian intellectual codes had faded out. What is immediate does not need to be explained, as the context is assumed; when ideas and motives are no longer so current, readers need the benefit of ‘background’ and ‘help’. In the 1850s Marx still wrote in an idiom reflecting his reading of Young Hegelianism, having decided to apply it to a critique of political economy. He was in a certain sense rather old-fashioned and out of date after 1848, and not just in terms of intellectual approach. His political strategies never really got to grips with the party politics and (limited) constitutionalism that arrived in the 1860s; none the less Capital, vol. I (1867) was supposed to be the political book of the age. I find it rather mysterious exactly how this formidable tome was supposed to connect with what kind of political movement; indeed, Capital is famous as one of the greatly respected but little read books of all time.


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The Gospel According to Engels The Hegel–Marx narrative was created by Engels to explain away this problem, by arguing that Hegel was still relevant and by enabling Marx’s audience to get in touch with his message, once the Hegelian context had been set. As the story emerged in Engels’ book review of August 1859, Marx appears as Jesus to Hegel’s John the Baptist (almost!). Or at least Marx appears as the successor German philosopher and revolutionary inverter of philosophical truth. Rather unfortunately the Engelsian mixed metaphors were themselves Young Hegelianism revisited. These were magical kernels and mystical shells, turning Hegel upright so that he stands on his feet, inverting an idealist dialectic to make it materialist, etc.7 It is all rather mysterious, or simple-minded, though not nearly as bad as the infamous ‘thesis–antithesis–synthesis’, which an early commentator and populariser – Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus – inflicted on the undeserving master, and which some commentators – the lowest of the low, in my view – further visited on Engels and Marx.8 One is tempted to turn to the Theses on Feuerbach (written in 1845) for clarification of Marx’s ‘philosophical’ position vis-à-vis Hegel, as indeed Engels did, when he published them in edited form in 1888; but then it is easy to lose sight of the fact that they are Theses on Feuerbach! Feuerbach is currently read, if read at all, as an add-on to Hegel (in a context set by Marx), quite the reverse of the historical position and contemporary Left Hegelian view in which Feuerbach was central and ‘transformative’. At that point he was, of course, not the precursor of Marx, but rather the author of the Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy, and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (both published in 1843). In the 1830s and 1840s Marx’s engagement was overwhelmingly with the Young Hegelians, and with ‘the master’ only rather indirectly. Where Marx does address Hegel directly, it is ‘Hegel’ in the title that makes these texts now seem so central. Possibly one reading of Marx’s comment in 1858 that he had turned again to Hegel and found him useful was that Marx was actually surprised to have found anything useful in Hegel at all, given the way that he linked Hegelians with a feeble or febrile politics that he despised. None the less there are early studies by Marx that address Hegel directly, putting the Hegelians to rights. There is one on Hegel’s dialectic and another on his Philosophy of Right, and in both Marx shows his contemporaries how to do an immanent critique philosophically, and what the limitations of the Hegelian outlook amount to politically. Before Germany was anywhere

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near adopting representative institutions and modern economic doctrines, Marx exposed the hypocritical ‘liberal’ settlement, arguing in On the Jewish Question (1844) that it divided ‘free’ citizen from ‘economic’ man. Hegel’s bureaucratised constitutional monarchy in the Philosophy of Right never got that far, and Marx lambasted it mercilessly in his critique. Obviously Marx wrote these early published works, and early works intended somehow for publication, with an audience of the 1840s in mind, assuming that they would be familiar with the literature. Approaching such questions from that perspective in the 1860s would have seemed distinctly odd; hence the need for Engels to ‘frame’ Marx with a suitable narrative. As Marx was hardly a household name, Engels needed a peg to hang him on, and Hegel seemed an appropriately august figure – provided, of course, that he was properly contextualised and then bettered at his own game. While one may safely assume that Hegel was little read by then, he none the less had the reputation of filling the library shelves (his students having nearly finished a collected edition) and having ascended to a German Parnasus of nationalistic intellectual achievement. His encyclopaedic pretensions, his philosophical inscrutability and his Germanic appeal were all to Engels’ purpose. But Engels’ move begs the question whether Marx had to be hitched to anyone else at all, and if so, whether it had to be Hegel? Why not just present Marx as a critic of economic science, a veteran communist of the 1840s and an effective German stylist unbeholden to anyone in particular? Or indeed, as a polymath of astounding originality? In looking at Engels’ review of 1859, and his subsequent reworkings of this material in books and pamphlets of his own, and in his introductions and prefaces to Marx, I think we are dealing with Engels’ own autodidactic agenda. There is an air here of Engels reliving the heady days of lectures at Berlin University, when he skipped parade drill and gun-cleaning duty. It was Engels who broadened the focus beyond the critique of political economy (to include life, the universe and everything, i.e. laws of ‘nature, history, and thought’); it was Engels who singled out Hegel, quite exclusively, without noting the importance of the scholastic tradition, whether Aristotelian or otherwise; and it was Engels who contradictorily attempted to make Marx easier by putting the world’s most difficult philosopher between him and his audience. This is not to say that the strategy was unsuccessful. As Tom Bottomore once forcefully reminded me, nineteenth-century didacticism was rife amongst the working classes, and study groups were readily formed. Indeed scientific system-building was something to which Engels was


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responding, as well as responsive. Eventually he produced his own (rather self-denying) reply, in the form of Anti-Dühring (1877–8), Eugen von Dühring being a system-builder and penny-populariser par excellence. In my view Engels’ book was only politely noticed by Marx (Engels’ somewhat enigmatic comments to the contrary), and the same with the excerpts Socialism Utopian and Scientific (1880) – to which Marx wrote a brief introduction, curiously signed ‘Paul Lafargue’, the name of his son-in-law. Characteristically, Marx’s contributions on ‘economics’, posted to Engels at manuscript stage, were omitted by Engels from the first edition. My feeling is that Engels could never quite accept that ‘economics’ was the message. His insertion of Marx’s materials into subsequent editions of the text had more to do with Marx’s bodily assumption to a pantheon of socialist intellectuals than with the thrust and direction of Engels’ own argument in Anti-Dühring itself. Unlike Capital, Anti-Dühring was very, very widely read indeed.9 In my view Marx himself is the best guide to the importance of Hegel in his work, as indeed he would be to the importance of Aristotle or Paracelsus. In his ‘Postface’ (1873) to the second German edition of Capital (1872), Marx did say teasingly that he had coquetted with Hegelian terminology – but how seriously are we to take this? And he did say that he found ‘Hegel’s Logic’ useful in considering profit and its conceptual relationship with value, money and capital.10 This hardly seems to justify the familiar grand narrative of Marx, portrayed as Jacob in a lifelong wrestling match with the angel Hegel. Worst of all, the Hegelian-turn feeds the fantasies of commentators searching for precisely what Marx says isn’t there: a ‘historico-philosophic’ key to history and to what he is saying about it.11 Somehow, for most commentators, there has to be a simple key to guide us through the twists and turns of Marx’s argumentative prose. And on the assumption that there is, it follows that he was the sort of mystical Grand Master who wrote that way. I actually sympathise with hermetic readings of Hegel – he asked for it! – as Hegel used Rosicrucian imagery and alluded to mysterious entities and incarnations of truth. 12 But in my view Marx did not do these things, and it is worth reading each sentence of Capital, for example, right where it is, and seeing how it fits into an argument, however multi-layered and ironic. Capital is a text that is not without its difficulties, but the way to address these is hardly singular, hardly uncomplicated and hardly Hegelian. Before arguing that a strategy of ‘minimising Hegel’ would be a good one at present, even if only to get us away from the too familiar tramlines of almost 150 years of commentary, I should like to offer an olive

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branch to tradition by following through one of Marx’s own citations of Hegel – the one connected with the concept of profit in Capital – and developing a reading of an important turning point in his critique of political economy that depends explicitly on Hegel, and indeed on what is explicitly Hegelian. This then leaves me free to argue against the view, taken by rational-choice Marxists, that contemporary readings of Marx are best when they owe least to any ideas of ‘darkly Hegelian origin’.13

Marx – and ‘Hegel’s Logic’ It is well known that Marx was interested in ‘Hegel’s Logic’ and that on his own testimony he found it extremely helpful. But before this information can be of much assistance in understanding and evaluating Marx’s methods and views, we must have a view as to what this work is, and what use Marx made of it. In this section I argue, with detailed examples, that the terminology of Hegelian logic is not as far removed from the English philosophical tradition as is generally believed; and I discuss the various versions of a ‘Logic’ prepared by Hegel and his editors, in order to show which texts Marx was actually using. Then I examine Marx’s use of ‘Hegel’s Logic’ while he was at work in 1858 on the Grundrisse manuscripts, so that the reasoning behind an essential part of his critical theory of capitalist society is laid bare. I conclude that, as a master key to Marx’s work, ‘Hegel’s Logic’ has been overrated, but as a methodological sourcebook for Marx, it has been lamentably under-appreciated. Present-day English readers have more points of contact with Hegel’s treatises on logic than is generally realised by commentators on Marx. 14 In his works Hegel presents a revision of logic as it was understood and taught by his contemporaries, including the logic derived from the Greeks and modified by the medieval Scholastic tradition. That logic was until Hegel’s time much the same in English and in German. Today it is an elementary form of logic, so some of the distinctions which were basic to it are still in use, although they are not of much interest to mathematically-minded logicians: quality–quantity, analysis–synthesis, reality—appearance, essence–accident, subject–object are examples. Also there are terms in this elementary, traditional logic which have a special sense different from their modern everyday meaning.15 Some of the now unfamiliar terminology in the works of Hegel and Marx is neither particularly Germanic nor peculiarly Hegelian. It is simply the technical terminology of the traditional logic derived from the Greeks and the


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medieval schools. Definitions for these technical terms can be extracted from, among other sources, Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

What is ‘Hegel’s Logic’? It is no simple matter to turn to any of the three collected editions of Hegel’s works and pick out his ‘Logic’.16 Moreover Hegel has not made it obvious which of the two versions of his ‘Logic’ represents his definitive views, nor does Marx usually make it plain which version he had in mind when he spoke of ‘Hegel’s Logic’. It is possible, however, to surmount these difficulties, so that the ‘Logic’ becomes an accessible work, and it is also possible to state with certainty which version of it Marx found most useful in drafting his magnum opus, the critique of political economy. Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik – his Science of Logic – appeared in three parts in 1812, 1813 and 1816.17 A second edition of the first part was prepared by Hegel in 1831, the year of his death. An abbreviated version of the Science of Logic was incorporated by Hegel in his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse – The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline – first published in 1817, only a year after the Science of Logic was completed. The latter work is sometimes known as the Heidelberg Encyclopaedia, and its opening section as the ‘Shorter Logic’. The Encyclopaedia as a whole was published in two later editions (1827 and 1830), with Hegel’s own revisions to the text. But in the Werke edition of 1840–5 the Encyclopaedia, including the ‘Shorter Logic’, became a much longer and substantially different work, since the editors of the collected works (students and associates of Hegel) added their own lecture notes and comments throughout the book. 18 At points in the text where the same subjects are covered, there are significant differences between the ‘Shorter Logic’, as it appears in the Encyclopaedia, and the Science of Logic (sometimes known as the ‘Greater Logic’), but it is unclear which version of his views Hegel preferred. The second (partial) edition of the Science of Logic, on which Hegel was working just before he died in 1831, reproduced certain points in the 1812 edition. These passages had been altered by Hegel for the ‘Shorter Logic’ and reproduced in its three editions: 1817, 1827, 1830. Hence it appears that Hegel endorsed what he had said in 1817 when he prepared the 1830 edition of the Encyclopaedia, and then reverted in 1831, while working once again on the Science of Logic, to what he had said in 1812. In his Commentary, James MacTaggart suggests that neither the

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1830 Encyclopaedia nor the 1831 revisions to the Science of Logic represent a definitive text where the same subjects are covered. Marx used both the ‘Shorter’ and ‘Greater’ Logics; when he preferred the ‘Shorter’, he cannot be said to have used something elementary or inferior. 19 In a letter of 10 November 1837 to his father, Marx mentioned that he had ‘got to know Hegel from beginning to end’.20 During the rest of his career Marx occasionally referred to Hegel’s works without giving precise references, but it is certain that when he was writing the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 he made use of the ‘Shorter Logic’ (as it appeared in the 1830 edition of the Encyclopaedia).21 Marx used the Science of Logic (in the Werke edition of 1841) when he and Engels were writing The Holy Family.22 While he was working on volume I of Capital, Marx used the ‘Shorter Logic’, though this time it was the expanded Werke version of 1840–5.23 I have shown elsewhere that the ‘Greater Logic’ was very much in Marx’s mind during his work on what was to become the final version of his critique of political economy.24 It is the Science of Logic which I use below in analysing important arguments from the Grundrisse, and then relating that material to its final formulation in Capital.

English Hegelians It is generally assumed that Hegel’s philosophy, and, to be sure, Marx himself, were virtually unknown in English intellectual circles of the early 1850s. This was not quite the case. The first attempt at an English translation of ‘Hegel’s Logic’ was a paraphrase entitled The Subjective Logic of Hegel, published in London in 1855 by John Chapman, who was friendly with various intellectuals interested in German philosophy, and, as it happens, an acquaintance of Marx. In a diary entry for 27 July 1851, Chapman wrote: ‘Went with my brother to dine at Mrs Johnsons, met Freiligrath and a Herr Merks [sic], another exile.’25 Chapman was also the publisher of English versions of Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846) and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854), both influential works in Hegelian circles and both, as it happens, translated into English by Marian Evans, better known as George Eliot. He also published English translations of J. G. Fichte’s works, and brought out a version of Friedrich von Schelling’s The Philosophy of Art, translated by Andrew Johnson, which appeared in 1845. Johnson was a friend of Marx’s correspondent Ferdinand Freiligrath (who figures anecdotally in most accounts of Marx and his use of ‘Hegel’s Logic’) and of Marx himself. On 28 October 1852, Marx wrote to Engels: ‘If you have to write to me


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on important matters, do it under the address: A. Johnson, Esq., (Bullion Office, B[ank] of E[ngland]’ – it seems that Marx wanted to use the Bank of England (of all places) as a poste restante. 26 Johnson was the author of works on the gold supply and the theory of currency published in 1852 and 1856, a period generally – and wrongly – thought to be fallow for Marx’s economic studies, whereas actually he was at work on just those aspects of political economy.27

Marx’s Critique – and ‘Hegel’s Logic’ The exact connections between Marx’s critique of political economy and his use of Hegelian categories are still obscure. The Grundrisse has been said to be a ‘Hegelian’ work, but what does this mean? Why, in such a work, did Marx turn to Hegel for help? And why in the ‘Afterword’ to volume I of Capital (an essay that postdates the Grundrisse, Theories of Surplus Value, the manuscripts for Capital, vol. III, and nearly all of the manuscripts for vol. II) did Marx announce that he was still a pupil of Hegel? Marx made considerable use of ‘Hegel’s Logic’ in formulating the fundamental arguments of his critique of political economy, the work which functions as a foundation for his political and social thought. The connections between Marx’s arguments and Hegel’s can be elucidated from the texts, and Marx’s arguments can only then be grasped and analysed. The results may not impress present-day economists, even of the Marxist schools, but useful or not, Marx’s arguments in this specific context will continue to generate little but confusion until they are read in the first instance on his own terms. If Marx’s work on such a basic economic category as profit, for example, were ‘de-Hegelianised’, even by a well-meaning interpreter, the result would perhaps be more obviously ‘economic’, as the term is generally understood today, but it would have little to do with Marx, and the full import of his work would never emerge. But by the same token, this does not license a general ‘Hegelianising’ of Marx.

The Logic of Profit While Marx was working on the principal notebooks of the Grundrisse, he wrote to Engels (on 16 January 1858) that he had found ‘Hegel’s Logic’ useful in dealing with a particular economic category – profit. Freiligrath had offered him Mikhail Bakunin’s old copy, presumably an edition of the Science of Logic, in October 1857.28

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The difficulty with profit for Marx, as for numerous orthodox political economists, was explaining where in the economic process it arises. If it arises from the exchange of commodities, is it a surplus created by the exchange of one commodity for another of greater value? Or could profit arise even on a ‘fair exchange’, in which one commodity is exchanged for another of equal value? Alternatively, if profit arises from the production process, is it a joint product of labourer and capitalist? Or is it simply a portion of what the labourer produces that is deducted for various purposes by the capitalist? Marx’s method for solving these problems was to analyse the basic concepts involved – what he called the ‘simple determinations’. This was why he turned to ‘Hegel’s Logic’, as Hegel’s philosophical work was overtly occupied with conceptual analysis. What emerged from this encounter was immensely significant for his views on the structure and future of capitalist society. Once the economic ‘law of motion’ of capitalist society had been ‘laid bare’, other social phenomena would be seen to fall into place, and the eventual political development of capitalist society would become clear. 29 The ‘two-fold character of labour’ and the theory of ‘surplus value’ together represent Marx’s ultimate answer to the problems about profit posed above. But these theories presuppose a view of the fundamental ‘motion’ of capitalist society. According to Marx the capitalist system is not in equilibrium; rather, he claims that it has an inbuilt tendency to collapse because of the necessity to produce ever-increasing profits. 30 But what exactly is this alleged necessity to produce ever-increasing profits? Why is the circulation of capital ‘not a simple circle, but a spiral, an ever-expanding curve’? Marx set that very problem for himself in the Grundrisse: It is damned difficult for Messrs the [political] economists to progress theoretically from the self-preservation of value in capital to its expansion; that is to say, this [expansion] in its fundamental definition, not just as accident nor merely as result.31 If Marx could establish an ‘expansion’ in the fundamental definition of capital, it would follow that the production of ever-increasing profits was an essential, even a definitional part of the capitalist system, rather than something that capitalists might or might not generally choose to do. Marx undoubtedly recognised that individual capitalists might choose (somewhat eccentrically) not to employ their capital in a way that would increase their profits, though doubtless they would soon


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find themselves undercut and thrown out of business by others who had invested more wisely in the productive process. He also fully recognised that some capitalists might fail to employ their capital successfully because of bad luck or bad judgement. But at the end of the argument he concluded that capitalists could not, in general, decide not to employ their capital in order to increase their profits. That is, he decided that ‘expansion’ is no mere ‘accident’,32 but is an essential part of the concept ‘capital’: Chit-chat that no one will employ his capital without drawing a profit on it either amounts to the absurdity that upstanding capitalists will remain capitalists even without employing their capital; or to saying in a very homely way that profit-yielding employment lies in the very concept of capital. Well. That would just have to be demonstrated.33 In the ensuing demonstration that ‘profit-yielding employment lies in the very concept of capital’, Marx finds a ‘contradiction’ in money used as capital – a ‘contradiction’ between its quality as the representative of all forms of wealth to an infinite amount, and its limit as a specific quantity at any given time: The sole utility which an object can generally have for capital can only be to maintain or to increase it. We have already seen in the case of money, how value differentiated as such – or the general form of wealth – is capable of no other motion than quantitative; of increasing itself. According to its concept it is the epitome of all use-values; but as [it is] always but a specific quantity of money (here capital) its quantitative limitation is in contradiction with its quality. 34 Marx draws our attention to two aspects of money as it is used in capitalist production: money stands for wealth in a way that is absolutely general and theoretically limitless; but it must always exist in limited amounts as coins, notes, money of account; that is, it must always be expressed as some numerical figure or other. From this ‘contradiction’ Marx concludes: ‘There lies in its [money’s] nature a continual driving beyond its own limitation.’35 In the Grundrisse Marx develops the implications of this conclusion by arguing that capital requires the production of ever-increasing profits: For value, which retains its character as value, an increase in amount coincides in consequence with its self-preservation, and it is preserved

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only in that it continually drives beyond its quantitative limitation, which contradicts its definitional form, its inner generality. Enrichment is thus the inner purpose. The end-determining activity of capital can only be that of enrichment, i.e., the amassing, the increasing of itself. A specific sum of money (and money always exists for its owner as but a specific quantity, [it] is always there as a specific sum of money) . . . can fully satisfy only a specific consumption in which it has ceased to be money. But as representative of a limited wealth, it cannot do that. As a quantitatively specific sum, a limited sum, it is either only the limited representative of general wealth or the representative of a limited wealth, which goes precisely as far as its exchange-value; is exactly measured by it. Hence in no way does it have the capacity, which according to its general concept it ought to have, of buying all pleasures, all commodities, the totality of the material substance of wealth. . . . Retained as wealth, as the general form of wealth, as value which serves as value, it [money] is therefore the continual drive to go beyond its quantitative limit: an endless process. Its own life-quality consists in just this: it preserves itself as exchange-value performing its function distinct from use-value, only in that it is itself continually expanding . . . 36 In the above passage Marx has evidently done just what he set out to do: ‘ . . . to progress theoretically from the self-preservation of value in capital to its expansion . . . this [expansion] in its fundamental definition, not just as accident nor merely as result’.

Money – and ‘Hegel’s Logic’ However, in the course of Marx’s analysis of money as capital, two crucial questions arise: Why were the qualitative and quantitative aspects of money as capital said to be ‘in contradiction’? And why does it follow from this that money by its very nature entails ‘a continual driving beyond its own limitations’ and hence a ‘continual drive to go beyond its quantitative limit’ in functioning as capital? In setting out these views, Marx’s line of argument follows very closely Hegel’s discussion of ‘the finite’, its negation as ‘limitation’, and the negation of this negation when it ‘transcends its limitation’. These arguments are developed in the Science of Logic: Something with its immanent limit, posited as the contradiction of itself . . . is the finite . . . The finite is thus inwardly self-contradictory


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. . . Something’s own limit [is] thus posited by it as a negative . . . The limitation of the finite is not something external to it; on the contrary, its own determination is also its limitation . . . But now further, the finite as ought37 transcends its limitation . . . its limit is also not its limit . . . 38 Hegel concludes: ‘It is the very nature of the finite to transcend itself, to negate its negation and to become infinite.’ 39 Marx’s development of the ‘life-quality’ of money in capitalist society is exactly parallel to the progression of Hegel’s argument. Like ‘the infinite’, money is ‘inwardly self-contradictory’; its ‘quantitative limitation’ is its ‘own’, not merely ‘external’; it ‘transcends its limitation’ by ‘continually expanding’ – a ‘continual driving beyond its own limitations’. For money, as for Hegel’s ‘finite’, ‘its limit is also not its limit’. In general, capitalists do try to increase their profits, and if a capitalist were not to behave in this way, we would think it odd and seek some explanation, perhaps eccentricity or lassitude. Similarly, it would be difficult to imagine an economic system in which those with capital generally did not try to increase their profits; we would find it difficult to refer to such a system of behaviour as ‘capitalism’. If it is to these generalisations about behaviour that Marx was referring when he argued from a ‘contradiction’ in the concept ‘money’ to the conclusion that ‘profit-yielding employment lies in the very concept of capital’, then his point is well taken. However, Marx’s actual conclusion about a ‘drive’ within money functioning as capital does not follow merely from the arguments (derived from the Science of Logic) which he specifically adduces: the self-contradictory character of something finite (money), its negative relationship with a limitation (in this case, a quantitative one), and its drive to transcend this limitation by continually expanding. Do Marx’s ‘Hegelian’ arguments in the Grundrisse have any bearing, then, on his work in Capital, where we might expect to see conceptual analysis and substantiated generalisations in close alignment?

Capital and ‘Hegel’s Logic’ When Marx wrote that he had found ‘Hegel’s Logic’ useful in investigating profit, he left us, as we have seen, a valuable clue to an otherwise puzzling exposition of views in the Grundrisse. On my reading, these are views behind those expressed in Capital, where the necessity for everincreasing profits is simply assumed to be an immanent law of capitalist production. Marx pointed out in Capital, as he had done in the Grundrisse,

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that the reproduction of capital is not a circle, but a spiral. 40 Unlike the text of the Grundrisse, however, the argument in Capital proceeds without an analysis of the relevant ‘simple determinations’. I think it likely that the Hegelian exposition in the Grundrisse confirmed Marx in his view that ‘expansion’ is inherent in the ‘fundamental definition of capital’; and he might reasonably have considered that even a polished version of his work on the relevant ‘simple determinations’ in the Grundrisse was an unnecessary and possibly confusing step in putting his case to the reader of Capital. Marx’s theory of the ‘contradictory character of money’, whether or not it is plausible for the reasons he adduces in the Grundrisse, made it easy for him to argue the possibility of a new type of society, in which conventional behaviour would be very different from that in capitalist society. He drew the contrast in Capital: He [the capitalist] is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society’s productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. 41 Once Marx had shown that ‘profit-yielding employment’ lay ‘in the very concept of capital’, he had located certain patterns of human motivation and behaviour within the historically specific conventions of a particular type of society. Had he located the profit motive in, for example, an apparently invariant ‘human nature’, as other theorists had done,42 then it would have been difficult for him to argue that a qualitatively different society was a realistic possibility. But as I read him, Marx held the view that humans make – and re-make – their own nature and the societies in which they live through their productive activities, and that out of these activities come their ideas about themselves and their social possibilities.43 Hence his thesis was that the abolition of money and of its attendant contradictions would follow a reorganisation of production along communist lines, and the resultant society would not be a slave to the continual ‘expansion’ inherent in capital. Propositions from ‘Hegel’s Logic’, whether cited behind the scenes in the Grundrisse or presupposed without specific reference in Capital, vol. I, do not themselves prove for Marx, or for his readers, either that his account of the economic categories contains some necessary logic or


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that it reflects some immanent necessity in human behaviour. Rather, the strength of Marx’s account is that it sits precisely on the nexus between interlinked ideas and meaningful activities, without any presumption that scientific analysis must push factitiously to distinguish one from the other. With that in mind I turn in conclusion to Elster’s attempt to ‘make sense of Marx’.

Vicious/Virtuous Circles Contrary to my lines of analysis, Elster tackles the Hegel–Marx nexus very much as Engels understood it, focusing on ‘dialectics’, which he quite mistakenly says that Marx invoked ‘on numerous occasions’. Marx’s actual references to ‘dialectic’ are notably few, whereas the importance that Engels ascribed to this concept was absolutely fundamental, the major link between the one great thinker – Hegel – and his superior successor – Marx.44 As with most commentators, Engels’ narrative inspires them to imagine that Marx must frequently have said what Engels says he believed, whereas I find it impossible to discover Marx saying even once what Engels claims is the foundation of ‘the system’ – the three ‘laws of dialectics’. 45 Admittedly, I take the view that one cannot simply read Engels back into Marx, but rather that for traditional commentary to be persuasive, Marx must be seen to be making the case about and for his own work just as Engels puts it, not simply using the same words in his own discussions. Indeed, in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the book Engels was reviewing when the ‘grand narrative’ about Hegel and Marx first emerged, Marx famously set down the ‘guiding thread’ for his studies. My view of those paragraphs is that they are themselves hasty and ill-written, and later barely noticed in a footnote to Capital, but leaving that evaluation aside, it still seems to me to be striking that the word ‘dialectic’ does not occur there at all. 46 Elster boils down the Hegel–Marx connection to ‘three strands’: a ‘quasi-deductive procedure’ inspired by Hegel’s Logic and used in the Grundrisse and Capital (exactly what I discuss above); Engels’ ‘three laws of dialectics’, which in my view are Engels’ and not Marx’s; and finally, a ‘theory of social contradictions’ derived from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Elster and I agree about the second category – Engels’ ‘laws of dialectics’, that they are neither Marx’s nor interesting. Contrarily, I agree with Elster that the third category – a theory of ‘social contradictions’ – is both Marxian and interesting, though Elster seems rather overanxious to me in reducing what is of interest here to an exemplification

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of the ‘fallacy of composition’ – the view that what is in everyone’s best interest collectively is necessarily in the best interest of every individual. Unsurprisingly then, Elster and I disagree very clearly about the first ‘strand’, in that his methodologically individualist premises rule out a conceptual analysis of money, such as Marx attempted at length in Capital, and by which I am sufficiently intrigued to construct a reading. Elster legislates that those who are not methodologically individualist in his approved sense are methodological collectivists (surely a loaded term politically – they could be philosophical ‘holists’). Moreover, he also somewhat overloads his criticisms by characterising further Marx’s presumed position as incoherent and confused. My complaint is that Elster’s binary reductions (and abuse) lead to him to inveigh against the very question that I think it is interesting to ask: ‘whether the self-determination of capital is conceptual or behavioural – or whether we are meant to conclude that this very distinction is superseded’ – a conclusion I take Elster to be rejecting superciliously. 47 There are moments in analysis when drawing a distinction is not a helpful thing to do in the first place, and this is one of them. This is because the conceptual–behavioural distinction, to which Elster is wedded (and I am not), is the very one that rules out just what social science in my view is there to investigate – the circularity that necessarily obtains between ideas, individuals, and action. This circularity is neither analytically vicious nor merely logical. It is life.

Notes This chapter draws on material previously published in T. Carver, ‘Marx – and Hegel’s Logic’, Political Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (1976), pp. 57–68; and in T. Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), ch. 9; used with permission of the publishers. 1 See S. Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Duckworth, 1984). 2 I make and support this claim in T. Carver, Engels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), ch. 5. 3 G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 1–27. 4 For a detailed study of Marx’s early career as a Young Hegelian, see D. McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969 repr.). 5 See W. J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), and L. S. Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 6 These points are amplified in T. Carver, Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1989), ch. 6.


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7 T. Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983), pp. 105–6. 8 Carver, Engels, p. 50. 9 Carver, Marx and Engels, ch. 5. 10 K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, tr. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 102–3; K. Marx, ‘Letter to Frederick Engels’, 16 January, 1858, Collected Works, 40 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 249. 11 Marx to the Editorial Board of the ‘Otechestvenniye Zapiski’, November 1877, in K. Marx & F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, 2nd edition (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), p. 313. 12 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, ed. and tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 12, 303 n. 34. 13 J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 124. 14 See, for example, J. Plamenatz, Man and Society, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, 1963, repr. 1968), passim; B. Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 3–42; I. Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970), pp. 12–13. 15 See the notes on the following terms in K. Marx, Texts on Method, ed. T. Carver (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975): determinate/determined (p. 47), determination(s) (pp. 50–1), subject/object (p. 48), ideal (p. 48), universal (p. 51), difference (p. 51), reflection (p. 55), moment (p. 53), mediate (p. 57), immediately (pp. 58–9), virtually (p. 60), transcending (pp. 63–4), intension/ extension (p. 70), indifference (p. 77). 16 The three editions are the Werke (various editors) published 1832–87, the Jubiläumsausgabe ( Jubilee Edition) edited by Glockner and published during the 1920s and 1930s, and the critical edition undertaken by Lasson, published 1905–40 (see n. 18 below). 17 A copy of the first edition in the British Library (C. 43.a. 13) contains annotations, often sarcastic, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see n. 26 below), for example in the first book of the first volume: ‘This is the first sensible Remark I have met with. It occurs in Plato . . . ’ (p. 89) ‘My Stars! Now we pop upon it all at once. The to self-subsist[ing] determinate itself into The Selfsubsisting, order zum Eins – &c&c!! – And so comes Repulsion, Attraction, and Quantity. What christian Heart could desire a clearer account – a more luminous elucidation?’ (p. 91). 18 For his critical edition of the Science of Logic (vols 3–4 of Hegel’s Sämtliche Werke) Lasson takes the first (1812–16) edition as copy-text, explaining that Hegel’s revisions for a second edition of the first ‘book’ were difficult to read; as far as I can gather, this is a comment on the texts of 1833 and 1841 in the posthumously edited Werke edition, which allegedly took Hegel’s revisions into account. Lasson seems unaware that the partial second edition was actually published. The date of publication for this volume is usually given as 1831, since Hegel’s ‘Preface’ is dated 7 November of that year, but the book itself (now very rare) is actually dated 1832 (loan from the University Library, Leipzig). Glockner gives the 1840–5 expanded text of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia the title System der Philosophie (vols 8–10 of the Jubilee Edition) and reproduces the 1817 Heidelberg edition separately as Vol. 6.

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19 J. M. E. MacTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), pp. 2–3. 20 K. Marx ‘Letter to His Father’, Collected Works, 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), p. 19. 21 K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, tr. M. Milligan and D. J. Struik, Collected Works, 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), p. 330. 22 K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family: Or Critique of Critical Critique, tr. R. Dixon and C. Dutt, Collected Works, 4 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), p. 138. 23 K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 285 n. 24 Marx, Texts on Method, pp. 43, 55, 77, 89, 112, 113, 115, 117, 119–20, 127, 130, 131, 132, 137, 139–40. The ‘Greater Logic’ is available in an English translation by A. V. Miller as Hegel’s Science of Logic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969); Miller has based his work on Lasson’s text of 1923, rather than the corrected edition of 1932–4. The ‘Shorter Logic’, as it appeared in the expanded Encyclopaedia of 1840–5, has been translated into English by W. Wallace as The Logic of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1874, 2nd edn 1892, 3rd edn 1975). 25 G. S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman, 2nd edn (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1969), pp. 124 n. 195. Mrs Johnson was the wife of Andrew Johnson (see below). Ferdinand Freiligrath had worked with Marx on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne during 1848–9, and like Marx, emigrated to London; he was the author of a biographical memoir of Coleridge, and the translator of numerous British and American poets into German, as well as a poet in his own right. 26 K. Marx, ‘Letter to Frederick Engels’, 28 October, 1852, Collected Works, 39 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 227. 27 Marx, Texts on Method, pp. 23–7. 28 This copy has evidently disappeared; another was reported missing by Marx in 1861 when he received a shipment of books which had been in store in Germany for ten years. K. Marx, ‘Letter to Frederick Engels’, 16 January, 1858, Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 40, p. 249. Manfred Häckel, ed., Freiligraths Briefwechsel mit Marx und Engels (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1968), Vol. 1, p. 96; Bruno Kaiser, ed., Ex Libris Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967), pp. 9–11, and passim; also K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, 41 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), p. 616 n. 244. 29 K. Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 266; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 92. 30 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 739, 929. 31 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 266, 270–1. 32 ‘A property or quality not essential to our conception of a substance; an attribute.’ OED, s.v. Accident II.6. Logic. 33 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 270. 34 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 270. 35 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 270. 36 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 270. 37 ‘This in-itself, therefore, as the negative relation to its limit (which is also distinguished from it), to itself as limitation, is the ought.’ Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 132.

Hegel and Marx: Reflections on the Narrative 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47

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Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, pp. 129, 136, 132, 133. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, pp. 831, 834, 837. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 230–2, 252–5, 449–50, 726–8, 739. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 739. See, for example, the opening chapters of three works criticised on this point by Marx: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (first published 1776); David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (2nd edn 1821); Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (first published 1798). Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 171–3, 283–4. Carver, Engels, ch. 5; Carver, Marx and Engels, ch. 4. T. Carver, ‘Marx, Engels and Dialectics’, Political Studies 28 (1980), pp. 353–63. T. Carver, Marx’s Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), passim. J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 37–48.

3 Hegel’s Legacy Joseph McCarney

This essay deals with some aspects of the relationship between Hegel and Marx and with their influence on the development of Marxism. The story is largely, though not entirely, one of misunderstandings and misappropriations, lost opportunities, unnoticed slippages, wrong turnings and blind alleys. As a result the project which unites Hegel and Marx, and, indeed, is the driving force of their work, has fared less well than it might have done. This, to state it in the most general terms, is the project of a dialectical theory in the service of human freedom. Anyone interested in that project who wishes to gauge its current standing and prospects will need to understand its strange history. The history also contains elements of deep continuity and unity of thought, at least where Hegel and Marx themselves are concerned. Yet even these have been subject to distortion and forgetting by Marx’s successors. The discussion will try to do justice to them too.

An Ontological Break A natural starting point is provided by Marx’s break with Hegel. The central issues at stake in it were made abundantly clear by Marx himself, and they still lie at the heart of the debate over the meaning of Hegel’s philosophy. They may be introduced by saying that they concern the ontological status of Hegelian ‘Spirit’ and the Hegelian ‘Idea’. It will suffice for present purposes, and not be seriously contentious, if one assumes that while the Idea is the fundamental, universal category of Hegel’s ontology, Spirit is the Idea as it manifests itself in human consciousness and society, its expression in human life. The alternative readings that are available at this point are in general terms clear enough. It will sharpen the presentation of them if another factor is 56

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introduced into the account. The Idea, Hegel frequently assures us, is the philosopher’s name for God. Hence, on one interpretation, the fundamental principle of his ontology is to be identified with the God of traditional theism, the personal creator who is independent of, and superior to, his creation. On the alternative view, the Idea is in essence the God of pantheism; that is to say, the universe as such, conceived as an impersonal, unified whole. Spirit, the Idea as it reveals itself in human affairs, in, on the first view, an autonomous centre of subjectivity and action, a non-human, super-person who intervenes in, and shapes, our history. Alternatively, it appears as coextensive with, and exhausted by, the realm of human consciousness and action, as distributed over and embodied in the totality of human selves, and as wholly constituted by that distribution and embodiment. For convenience, and in line with convention, one may speak of a ‘transcendent’ and an ‘immanent’ interpretation of Spirit and the Idea. Where Marx stands on all this is not in any doubt, at least in its general outlines. He reads Hegel transcendently as a prelude to rejecting him. Some well-known formulations will suffice to make the essential point. The account in The Holy Family declares that, in Hegel’s conception, history becomes the history of ‘an Abstract or Absolute Spirit’, a Spirit ‘far removed from the real man’, a ‘person apart’, a ‘metaphysical subject of which the real human individuals are merely the bearers’. This ‘metaphysical monster’ is said elsewhere in the work to be ‘the restoration of the Christian theory of creation in a speculative, Hegelian form’. 1 In a ‘Postface’ to the first volume of Capital we are told that, for Hegel, ‘the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject under the name of “the Idea”, is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the Idea’. 2 Marx’s Hegel, it appears, is a Hegel whose ontology of transcendence is but the speculative expression of orthodox Christian theology. It is plainly not possible to settle the issue between immanence and transcendence here, nor is it necessary for the purposes of the argument to do so. Some considerations that favour the immanent side will emerge in the course of the discussion, but these are not in any sense decisive. For one thing, there must remain a residual stock of formulations that seem incontrovertibly to favour the opposition, and so the debate can be sustained indefinitely on a diet of suitable quotations. Of course, if the Hegel Marx rejects is not the true Hegel, it follows that the Marxist intellectual tradition, and more especially the branch of it usually known as Hegelian Marxism, is founded on a mistake. This conclusion is not needed either for present purposes. It suffices for the themes of

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lost opportunities and frustrated development to note that the interpretative choices were available in essentially the same form to Marx as they are today. This is to say that then, as now, the transcendent approach had something of the quality of a rearguard action, stubbornly maintained against the main thrust, both, as it were, quantitative and qualitative, of the textual evidence. A glance at the historical setting of Marx’s ontological break will serve to bear out these claims. It should be borne in mind that Hegel had been subjected to accusations of pantheism, and, what was not always clearly distinguished from it, atheism, from the early 1820s onwards. Thus, he had been obliged to defend himself, though rather uneasily and unconvincingly, in the second edition of the Encyclopaedia.3 The defence is less than wholly successful because the pantheism from which he distances himself is of the caricature ‘every secular thing is God’ kind. It failed to silence his critics. To the powerful evangelical party at Court in particular, he remained an object of deep suspicion. It did not prevail in his lifetime, but after his death Schelling was, notoriously, called to Berlin by the King to root out ‘the dragon seed of the Hegelian pantheism’. A sense of the gap between Hegel’s system and Christian orthodoxy was by no means confined to the orthodox. As Walter Jaeschke has pointed out: ‘Contemporaries had an entirely different picture of the various tendencies of the [Hegelian] School from that offered by our current perception, which is that it was the Old Hegelians who preserved the pure doctrine.’ On the contrary, it was, he notes, ‘the right-Hegelian interpretation’ which, in forcing Hegel into line with traditional Christian doctrine on the personality of God and the immortality of the soul, was regarded as ‘progressive’. What later became ‘the centre and the moderate left’ seemed, by contrast, ‘to adhere obstinately to the standpoint of the system’.4 Thus it was the Old Hegelians who were seen as the innovators. Their opponents, who denied that any injection of transcendence is needed to make the system work, were, from this standpoint, the true conservatives. It should also be recalled that the young Marx had models of immanence close at hand in the intellectual circles in which he moved. Most obviously, there was Bruno Bauer’s reading of absolute Spirit as human self-consciousness. In the blast of irony entitled Trumpet of the Last Judgement over Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist, he had declared that ‘God is dead for philosophy’ and that ‘self-consciousness is the only power in the world and history, and history has no other meaning than the becoming and development of self-consciousness’.5 Whatever the crudities and limitations of Bauer’s account, it plainly offers an alternative to

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thinking in terms of the history of an absolute Spirit ‘far removed from the real man’. This is not, of course, to suggest that Marx’s interpretation is merely idiosyncratic or perverse, but simply that it was in no sense forced upon him in the circumstances of his time. The option he chose has in any case its own antecedents and sources of inspiration. Above all, there was the seductive example of Ludwig Feuerbach and his transformative logic of subject and predicate. This is the logic Marx echoes in asserting that ‘Hegel at all times makes the Idea the subject, and makes the proper and actual subject . . . the predicate’.6 Feuerbach had used the technique of reversing Hegel’s terms in his programme of disclosing the true relationship of theology, philosophy and anthropology. In a work which greatly influenced Marx, he declares that ‘the secret of theology is anthropology, but the secret of speculative philosophy is theology’.7 In implying that the deepest secret of Hegelian speculation is anthropology, Feuerbach seems not far away from Bauer. At times the affinity emerges plainly in his language, as when he insists: ‘The necessary turning point of history is . . . the open confession that the consciousness of God is nothing else than the consciousness of the [human] species.’8 The work of both thinkers may be seen as fitting comfortably within the ‘dialectical humanism’ which marks the early phases of the reception of Hegel’s thought.9 The crucial difference between Bauer and Feuerbach lies in their understanding of their relationship to Hegel. The human immanence which Bauer grasps as the esoteric meaning of his work is affirmed by Feuerbach as a radically anti-Hegelian conception. In taking this view, Feuerbach and, following him, Marx are in essential agreement with the Old Hegelian interpretation of Hegel’s ontology. What the Old Hegelians labour to read into Hegel in order to celebrate is, however, proclaimed by Feuerbach and Marx as grounds for his rejection. This serves to illustrate the complications which attend the taxonomy of Old and Young Hegelians. It has, as it were, to operate in two dimensions, in terms of how Hegel is seen and in terms of whether one likes what one sees. This makes for some odd alliances and oppositions. From the standpoint of the present discussion, however, it cannot but seem unfortunate that, on central issues of interpretation, Marx should have aligned himself with Feuerbach rather than Bauer. It was the first decisive step on a path which has led the Marxist intellectual tradition far from its theoretical roots. Instead of a sustained, organic development which takes up and takes forward the accumulated riches of the past, there is an abstract and sterile rupture, paving the way for further such ruptures in the future. What has been lost is the possibility that

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Marxism might have evolved as the true dialectical overcoming, the Aufhebung, of the Hegelian system. To focus this greatest of missed opportunities more sharply, one should consider some exemplary instances of how things went after Marx.

Marxists on Hegel It is natural that attention should focus on Hegelian Marxism, and specifically on what is for it the key area of the philosophy of history, an area whose importance for present concerns has already been signalled. The greatest figure in the movement is Georg Lukács, and his major direct contribution to it is The Young Hegel. It is all too easy to exhibit this work as being incoherent in its understanding and assessment of its subject. One the one hand, Lukács seems plainly aware that history is, for Hegel, solely the work of human beings. He remarks that ‘respect and even reference for the realities of history form the foundation of Hegelian philosophy’. Hegel’s sense of reality is displayed most keenly in an understanding of economic problems which was crucial ‘for the emergence of a consciously dialectical mode of thought’. Above all, he grasps ‘the problem of work as the central mode of human activity’. Hence, it comes as no surprise to be told that: The main thrust of Hegel’s view of history . . . culminates in the concrete realm of human praxis; it aims at achieving a philosophical understanding of the real historical process that necessarily led to the establishment of modern civil society.10 Hegel’s realism is, it appears, of the very best quality, the quality specific to a historical materialism. Alongside this strain of judgement in The Young Hegel there is, however, another, and in the end predominant, strain to be set. Thus, we read of Hegel’s ‘wholesale mystification of the historical process’, and of ‘his hypostatisation of a “spirit” which acts as the conscious principle in which it is grounded’. Even more drastically, we are told that since, for Hegel, ‘nature and history are the products of a “spirit”’, history must ‘realise the purpose which the “spirit” had posited as a goal from the outset’. In consequence, Lukács continues, ‘the whole process is thereby transformed into a pseudo-movement’. Hegel, he concludes, ‘lost his way in the miasmas of idealism where a mystified demiurge carried on its “activities”’. 11 This strain of judgement clearly echoes, even in the detail of its expression, the verdict of Marx cited earlier.

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It is true that Lukács believes he has theoretical reasons for taking such a view. Chief among them is the assumption that the teleology which is undeniably built into Hegel’s conception of history requires a positing subject. This assumption is at work in the formulations quoted above, and is made even more explicit elsewhere in Lukács’ work.12 It fails, however, to register the full significance of what he is also at another level aware, the role of internal teleology in Hegel’s thought. This is not the teleology of the labour process, dealing instrumentally with tools and materials, but rather that of an immanent impulse of the subject matter itself. It is essentially Kant’s ‘purposiveness without purpose’ or, one should add, a purposer. The failure to come to terms adequately with this theme in Hegel has a more general significance for Hegelian Marxism, but the issues involved cannot be explored further here.13 The point to note for the present is that, quite apart from any dubious theoretical considerations, there is, for Lukács, the inescapable and overwhelming authority of the model provided by Marx’s break with Hegel. This ensures that he is in the end unable to carry through the best insights of The Young Hegel. It is what makes the book a flawed work of genius rather than the complete Aufhebung of all that went before and resolution of its contradictions, the crown of the dialectical sequence Hegel, Marx, Lukács. A similar double-mindedness is to be found in a second major work of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution. Marcuse recognises that for Hegel ‘the world is in its very essence the product of man’s historical activity’. Moreover, the concept of labour is, he affirms, ‘not peripheral in Hegel’s system’ but is ‘the central notion through which he conceives the development of society’. Elsewhere, Marcuse pays tribute to Hegel’s realism, a realism that is founded, it appears once again, on materialism. ‘At its roots’, we are told, ‘the Philosophy of Right is materialist in approach.’ In the Philosophy of History, for its part, the historical development is, Marcuse declares, ‘conceived as one in which man makes himself the actual subject of the historical process’. 14 There is no hint in all this of any irruption of transcendence into human history, and no hint that such an irruption might be necessary. Marcuse’s final and, as it were, official judgement is, however, quite other than, and impossible to reconcile with, these insights. Hegel, we are told, ‘tends to dissolve the element of historical practice and replace it with the independent reality of thought’. An ‘historical conception’ of ‘the notion’ is constantly overwhelmed in his philosophy by ‘the ontological conceptions of absolute idealism’. These conceptions ensure that, while the world mind is the ‘hypostatic subject’ of history, it is

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itself but ‘a metaphysical substitute for the real subject, the unfathomable God of a frustrated humanity’.15 Once again, the echoes of Marx’s depiction of his break with Hegel seem unmistakable. For Marcuse, as for Lukács, the canonical authority of that depiction is in the end irresistible, however much their detailed insights may expose the shakiness of its foundations. To get a glimpse of what is, at least potentially, a more fruitful strategy, one should turn to a thinker who is certainly no less subject to Marx’s authority than are Lukács and Marcuse. In the Philosophical Notebooks Lenin resolves ‘to read Hegel materialistically’, and explains: ‘that is to say, I cast aside for the most part God, the Absolute, the Pure Idea, etc.’. The suggestion that now arises is that it may well be more fruitful, from a historical materialist standpoint, simply to cast these notions aside, without seeking to interpret them, than to interpret them in the transcendent manner of Marx. For it may be more likely to enable one to unearth the substance of what, from that standpoint, is valuable in Hegel. It may, at any rate, be said to have done so for Lenin. His strategy of reading leads to a conclusion which he announces with unmistakable surprise and excitement: Movement and ‘self-movement’ (this NB! arbitrary (independent), spontaneous, internally-necessary movement), ‘change’, ‘movement and vitality’, ‘the principle of all self-movement,’ ‘impulse’ (Trieb) to ‘movement’ and to ‘activity’ – the opposite to ‘dead Being’ – who would believe that this is the core of ‘Hegelianism’ of abstract and abstrusen (ponderous, absurd?) Hegelianism??’ This sense of a revelation leads Lenin on to a hyperbolic and notorious claim: It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx.16 These are all, of course, fragmentary remarks, never intended for publication. The line of thought they mark is, nevertheless, of great interest and fertility. It fits precisely with the approach favoured in the present discussion to suppose that Lenin had indeed reached to the core of Hegelianism. All that is lacking on his part is the realisation that what he had thus identified, the spontaneous, internally necessary self-movement,

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is the Hegelian Absolute. There is nothing left over which needs to be cast aside in a materialist reading. To have taken this further step would have been to unlock all the resources of Hegel’s system and put them at the disposal of historical materialism. That Lenin did not take it may be seen from one point of view as not the least of the missed opportunities which bulk so large in this account. That in a deeper sense, in view of who he was and his historical situation, he could not possibly have done so shows rather the ramified, stultifying effects of the orthodox Marxist view of the Hegel–Marx connection.

Politics of Spirit The question that now arises is what the implications of this historical sketch are for the idea of a dialectical, emancipatory theory. To pose the issues as sharply as possible, one must ask what are the politics of transcendent, as contrasted with those of immanent, Spirit. The reception of Hegel’s thought can once again offer some pointers. To take an obvious instance, the Old Hegelians plainly knew what they were doing in trying to bring him into line with religious orthodoxy. They were well aware that success in this would make for a coherent fit with their own social and political conservatism, while interpretations such as that of Bauer raised practical as well as theoretical dangers. There is, however, a multitude of examples through which the basic relationships here might be explored. A particularly illuminating perspective on them is offered by a modern writer, Charles Taylor. This is so in large part because of the highly self-conscious and architectonic character of his reading of Hegel. For Taylor, Hegelian ‘Geist’ is a ‘cosmic spirit’ which is emphatically not to be identified with the merely human, one whose ‘self-expression and self-awareness’ is ‘something infinitely higher than our own’. This has profound implications for the central thesis of Hegel’s philosophy of history, that history is the development of the consciousness, and the actuality, of freedom. For the freedom in question, it now appears, is ‘something immeasurably greater than the freedom of finite spirits’. Thus, Taylor wishes to distinguish Hegel sharply from thinkers such as Rousseau or Kant who ‘defined freedom as human freedom’. For Hegel by contrast, the thought or reason whose service is freedom ‘turns out not to be that of man alone, but rather that of the cosmic spirit which posits the universe’, a spirit which Taylor, quite understandably, identifies with God. Putting the point in philosophical language, it is that Hegel is ‘not talking of the idea of merely human freedom, but rather of the cosmic Idea’.17

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Taylor is quite clear and explicit as regards the social and political correlates of this doctrine. They derive, as he points out, from its displacement of the centre of gravity of the idea of radical autonomy ‘from man to Geist’. ‘What is conservative, or at least non-revolutionary, in Hegel has its source’, we are told, ‘in the thesis that the rationality of the real is not that of man, but of Geist.’ It is the view of ‘cosmic spirit as the subject of history’ which, Taylor notes, ‘rules out the possibility of a revolutionary praxis founded on reason’. Hence it is that Hegel ‘sets his face firmly against any further revolutionary transformations’, believing instead that ‘history had come to some kind of plateau, on which the need for revolution was past.’18 The triumph of cosmic Geist ensures, to put the matter crudely, that in the world of modern capitalism we are already living at the end of history. Against the background of this interpretation of Spirit, Taylor’s account of Marx’s break with Hegel is wholly consistent and predictable. It becomes clear why, as he tells us, ‘the young Hegelians and particularly Marx saw the rejection of Hegel’s Geist as the essential step from his philosophy to theirs’. What they required was an ‘anthropologising’ of Hegel’s thought which does away with ‘the cosmic subject of history’, and with ‘the reason whose cunning is always beyond men’s understanding at the time’. By substituting ‘man’ as the subject of history they allow for the time when ‘the transformations he is bringing about are finally fully understood by him’, that is, ‘the epoch of the proletarian revolution’. 19 It seems plain that Taylor is endorsing the substance of Marx’s understanding of Hegel’s ontology, and, hence, of his conception of what was at stake in his repudiation of Hegel. Reactionary metaphysics has to be discarded to make room for revolutionary politics. To take a different view of Hegel’s metaphysics from that of Marx and Taylor is, obviously, to open up other ways of conceiving of its political implications. What is revolutionary in Hegel will then turn out to have its source in his metaphysics of immanence, and specifically in the thesis that the rationality of the real is, and can only be, that of the human Spirit. The discussion should now turn to the social and political vision that is projected by the idea of immanent Spirit. If the goal of freedom ceases to be displaced on to a non-human subject, and has to be realised wholly within the confines of human life, how, one should ask, is its realisation to be conceived? What institutional arrangements are required for that purpose? This is a large question to which nothing like justice can be done here. There is, however, a line of thought it may be fruitful to pursue. It begins by noting that the weight of Hegel’s dealings

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with these matters falls overwhelmingly on the universal character of the freedom that comes about in history. In a superficial, but still suggestive, way, this is borne out by his standard classification of the successive historical epochs into those in which freedom is attributed to ‘one’, ‘some’ and, finally, ‘all’. The theme is more usefully spelled out in such passages as the following: The substance of the Spirit is freedom. From this, we can infer that its end in the historical process is the freedom of the subject to follow its own conscience and morality, and to pursue and implement its own universal ends; it also implies that the subject has infinite value and that it must become conscious of its supremacy. The end of the world Spirit is realised in substance through the freedom of each individual.20 This passage encapsulates the movement of thought that now concerns us, from Spirit to a radically universalistic and egalitarian vision of freedom. There is a general point of a negative kind which will serve to fix the issues more sharply. It is that the freedom now in question is emphatically not realised in the society depicted in Hegel’s major work of political theory, the Philosophy of Right, and he is far from supposing that it is. To see this, it suffices to be reminded of the ‘ethical corruption’ of the rich in that society, the spiritual impoverishment of the workers tied to a particular kind of work and cut off from its ‘wider freedoms’, and the alienation of the rabble who seethe with ‘inward rebellion against the rich, against society and the government’. Above all, there is the spectacle of large-scale poverty which takes the specific form, Hegel declares, of an injustice done to one class (Klasse) by another. Thus, the subject groups are condemned to live in systematic injustice and unfreedom. To suggest that each individual member of this society is accorded recognition of their ‘infinite value’ would be absurd. It is notorious also that Hegel has no solution to offer for the greatest problem he depicts, that of poverty. Indeed, he acknowledges that no solution is possible within the given social framework, and takes his leave of the problem by simply consigning it to the workings of time. 21 It seem obvious that Hegel’s predicament flows inescapably from his basic premises and could be resolved by abandoning them. In particular, there is his commitment to private property, including private property in the means of production, and thereby to the capitalist market system. Indeed, some writers have supposed that there is an esoteric Hegel who

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in this instance had taken the necessary steps already. 22 The image of him as a secret communist, or even as a radical, but uncandid, critic of bourgeois property relations, is, however, hard to sustain. For his attachment to the institution of private property is deep and principled. It is for him indispensable as the objective embodiment of personality and, thereby, of freedom. 23 Apart from all theoretical considerations, he had early come to the view which he never relinquished that ‘the fate of property has become too powerful for us to tolerate reflections on it, to find its abolition thinkable.’24 As the context makes clear, it is individual private property he has in mind. The point is that, in view of its status as the manifest destiny of his time and place, reflection on its abolition could only be a form of wishful thinking or the elaboration of an abstract ‘ought’, a project with no place in dialectical theory. Thus, in the Philosophy of Right he remains in the grip of a truly iron dilemma. The institutional arrangements he depicts there cannot be the true home of freedom, and yet he has no alternative to suggest in their place. It follows that he quite literally does not know how freedom is concretely to be realised. In a certain sense it is, of course, true that he ought to have been a socialist. This would at any rate have averted his dilemma in the form in which it has been presented here. It is equally true that he was not, and, in virtue of his historical situation and personal convictions, could not have been. That the graphic realism of his picture of capitalist society should, nevertheless, point this direction out so plainly to others may be regarded by socialists as not the least of his services to the cause of human emancipation.

Elements of Continuity The relationship of Hegel to Marxism is by no means simply one of illjudged rupture leading to separate development. To suppose this would be to miss the important sense in which Marx understood Hegel better than any of the other Hegelians, Old or Young, the sense in which he remained always a Hegelian and in which his Hegelianism permeated classical Marxism. It is, therefore, also the sense in which, to echo Lenin, Marx and Marxism cannot be understood without understanding Hegel. The key issue is the role of theory, its relationship to its object and the connection between theory and practice. The basic Hegelian thesis is that theory is the bringing to consciousness and self-consciousness of the hidden movement of reality. This is an essential part of what makes it dialectical, as opposed to being merely explanatory, contemplative or

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utopian. Hence, there is truth in the stock formula that what Marx takes primarily from Hegel is the method of dialectics. Method should not, however, be taken as signifying any determinate and uniform set of procedures. The essence of the dialectical method is simply what Hegel calls ‘surrender to the life of the object’, and the thinking of that life in systematic, discursive form. 25 This is the conception that is involved when he tells us that philosophy is ‘its own time comprehended in thoughts’.26 What Marx’s work seeks to comprehend in thoughts is the revolutionary movement that is the emergent reality of capitalist society. The basic Hegelian thesis finds metaphorical expression in the demand of the young critic of Hegel that ‘petrified conditions must be made to dance by having their own tune sung to them’.27 In Marx’s later writings the image of theory as the ‘voice’ or ‘expression’ of the revolutionary movement is regularly invoked. Thus, the socialists and communists who are ‘the theoreticians of the proletarian class’ are said to have no need ‘to seek science in their minds’, but have only ‘to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece’.28 Such a view becomes standard in the work of the major figures of Hegelian Marxism. Karl Korsch declares that ‘the Marxist system is the theoretical expression of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat’.29 Lukács for his part maintains that ‘the theory is the intellectual expression of the revolutionary process itself’.30 These formulations encapsulate the authentic Hegelian ingredient of Marxism, the conception of theory as the self-consciousness of a dynamic reality. That Marx conceives of his own work in these terms, and that his inspiration in doing so is Hegelian, should be borne in mind for a number of reasons. Most of all it enables some puzzles to be cleared up which would otherwise be intractable. An example may be given which will advance the main line of argument. This discussion has offered a perspective on the striking antipathy Hegel displays towards the business of criticism, the business of finding reasons for changing or rejecting something by pointing out its defects. Such fault-finding is routinely regarded by him as facile, vain, pointless, juvenile and mean-spirited. 31 Marx’s sympathy with this strain of thought and sensibility is shown most clearly in the discussion of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. Proudhon’s fundamental error, according to Marx, is his insistence in imposing on Hegel’s dialectic ‘the dogmatic distinction between good and bad’, and then setting the problem of how to eliminate the bad side. This ‘cuts short’ the dialectical movement: ‘the categories are deprived of all spontaneity; the idea “ceases to function”; there is no life left in it’. For Hegel, by contrast, ‘dialectical movement is

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the co-existence of two contradictory sides, their conflict and their fusion into a new category’. Thus, the movement is the work of the contradictions themselves, accomplished without the mediation of negative appraisals. With Proudhon’s fixation on such appraisals, the substance of Hegel’s dialectic is lost and nothing remains ‘but the language’: Dialectics has ceased to be the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any dialectics but only, at the most, absolutely pure morality.32 For Hegel and Marx, on the other hand, what is required of the dialectical thinker is not to moralise the immanent movement of reason and of reality but to surrender to it and seek to articulate it, to ‘become its mouthpiece’. On a larger scale, the Hegelian conception of theory shows itself in Marx’s refusal, whenever he addresses the matter self-consciously, to allow a normative dimension to his own work. This refusal has been a scandal to some readers, and the occasion in recent years of intense and inconclusive debate. Most of the issues supposedly at stake in the debate will evaporate at once if one recognises that Marx can quite consistently deny that his science is constituted as a critique of capitalist society, while personally detesting that society on normative, and specifically moral, grounds. The issue of the logical status of the theory needs to be separated from that of the values of the theorist. It has to be admitted, however, that insisting on this distinction in the present context gives rise to an urgent question. For if Marx’s science is not essentially a critique of capitalism, how is its service of the cause of human emancipation to be conceived? It appears that its practical significance does not consist in an aspiration to supply reasons for acting to change its object. Hence, one must ask in what this significance does consist? What, to put the question still more sharply, constitutes it as socialist science? It is not possible to pursue this question at length here. All that can be done is to indicate the general form the answer must take.33 If the theory lacks a normative dimension, it must somehow be conceived of as bearing on practice just in virtue of its cognitive content. It has, one seems obliged to say, to be thought of as serving to form and transform the subject who grasps that content. It must do so through providing the subject with a scientific understanding of itself and of its situation in the world. In the case of Marx’s science the subject is the proletariat. It has to be thought of as acquiring class consciousness, and ultimately

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a socialist consciousness, through its developing ability to penetrate the fog of appearance and illusion that surrounds it in the capitalist world. This is the basic Marxist version of the Hegelian doctrine that selfknowledge is, in and of itself, a practical force. The self is altered just in being known, or in becoming the object of deeper, more systematic knowledge. Since, in such a case, object and subject are one, the knowledge is transformative of the knower also. Thus, Spirit’s development in history is presented by Hegel as a process of self-making through the acquisition of new, higher forms of self-consciousness. Within Marxism the general theme is, as one might expect, to be found at its most explicit and developed in the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness. It is, however, firmly captured in a passage from Marx which serves as an epigraph to the essay on ‘Class Consciousness’ in that work: The question is not what goal is envisaged for the time being by this or that member of the proletariat, or even by the proletariat as a whole. The question is what is the proletariat and what course of action will it be forced historically to take in conformity with its own nature?34 The modality we have to deal with here is not that of normative reasoning but that of ontological necessity, of what the proletariat is forced to do in conformity with what it is, its own nature. Theory activates this necessity by disclosing to the proletariat what its nature is and what the truth is of the world in which it must live and act. Therein lies its practical efficacy and significance.

Transition to Critical Theory The dialectical conception of the relationship of theory to its object is the true legacy of Hegel to Marx. It must be acknowledged, however, that it is by no means a lasting legacy so far as Marxism is concerned. Indeed, in the work of the archetypal Western Marxists, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, one may study the process of its explicit rejection. It is in this context that one should set the aim of Reason and Revolution ‘to show how the inner workings of Western philosophy necessitated the transition to the critical theory of society’.35 Counterposed to that aim, one should set there also Marcuse’s enduring belief that Korsch and Lukács represented the ‘most authentic’ current of Marxism.36 The key document must, however, be Max Horkheimer’s programmatic essay on ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’. It contains

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some impeccably dialectical formulations. Thus, it speaks for a conception in which ‘the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class’, and for the ‘idea of a theory which becomes a genuine force, consisting in the self-awareness of the subjects of a great historical revolution’. At the same time some crucial positions occupied by Marx and Lukács have begun to be abandoned. This is most evident in the persistent concern to detach the fate of critical theory from that of their revolutionary subject: ‘even the situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge’. There is no ‘social class by whose acceptance of the theory one could be guided’. The conclusion to be drawn is that, in the end, ‘the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for the abolition of social injustice’.37 It is impossible not to recall here that this particular concern is consistently scorned by Marx as a form of motivation, and that he deliberately took every possible step to avoid having to appeal to it. 38 Horkheimer’s essay offers, one should note, its own version of the curious tendency to face two ways at once which has haunted this discussion. The direction towards which it ultimately points is, however, clear enough. It is towards the relaunch of socialist theory as an essentially normative undertaking, addressed to everyone in general, or at least to all who are capable of attending to the deliverances of practical reason. With the passage of time the critical theory of the Frankfurt School came, however, to be addressed more specifically to the intellectuals, a group whose emancipatory potential figures scarcely at all in classical Marxism. 39 This development may be said to close a circle in the history of thought. For it should be seen as a return to a standpoint which Marx had left behind in his youth, to the revolution of critical consciousness of which the Young Hegelians had declared themselves to be the prophets and vehicles. The leading figures of the School were well aware of this pattern of movement. Such an awareness informs Adorno’s taking to task the attitude to criticism of the mature Marx: In his youth he had demanded the ‘ruthless criticism of everything that exists’. Now he mocked criticism. But his famous joke about the Young Hegelians, his coinage ‘critical criticism’ was a dud and went up in smoke as nothing but a tautology. 40 It is plain that Adorno understands very well, while deploring, the fact that Marx’s mature theory is not essentially constituted as criticism of

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anything, still less everything, that exists. Elsewhere, Adorno makes the Young Hegelian connection even more explicit, as when he concedes that in the critical theory of society ‘one is forced back almost inevitably to the standpoint of Left Hegelianism, so scornfully criticised by Marx and Engels’. 41 He cannot, of course, be held responsible for the fact that at a still later stage this acute sense of the history was to be lost. In our own time Marx’s theory is quite routinely assumed or asserted, at least by those who grasp that it must have a practical, and not merely explanatory, significance, to be a systematic critique of capitalism. This view displays the usual mark of the hegemonic, that no need is generally felt to support it with arguments or evidence. It is, moreover, so widespread that any citing of illustrations will be unnecessary, even invidious. Yet it is in essence a return to a distortion imposed on Hegel by his progressively minded followers, a distortion which it was Marx’s great achievement to unmask and overcome. It is plainly necessary to be a dialectician, or a devotee of soap opera, to do justice to this expanse of intellectual history with its improbable twists, unprepared disappearances, bouts of amnesia, farcical repetitions and returns from the dead. There seems little point in lamenting, or assigning blame for, these developments, and to do so would in any case show an undialectical spirit. Instead, they have to be understood as themselves reflecting the movement of objective reality in the period in question. What underlies the transition to the critical theory of society, and indeed to Western Marxism in general, is clearly indicated in Horkheimer’s essay. It is a failure of nerve as regards the identification of the revolutionary subject, following a loss of confidence in the subject identified by Marx and Lukács, the proletariat of advanced capitalism. There is surely no need to labour the point that their identification cannot now be restored, at least in its original form. To suppose otherwise could only be to shut one’s eyes to the subsequent course of history or to wish it away, a proceeding even more at odds with the spirit of dialectical thought. For anyone who is not content to fall back on social critique; that is, in practice, to abandon dialectics for morality, a problem arises at this point. It is the problem of how theory can continue to be both dialectically integrated with the immanent movement of reality and serve the cause of human emancipation. This is perhaps the central question that confronts anyone who now wishes to work in the intellectual tradition founded by Marx. All that can be done here is to suggest a way in which the burden of it may be eased. The suggestion is that there is still something more that socialists may learn from Hegel.

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Learning from Hegel An indication of what that is was given in the discussion of Taylor’s view of Marx’s ontological break. It lies in the contrast he draws attention to between a cunning which is always beyond ‘men’s understanding’ at the time and transformations which are fully understood by those bringing them about. Taylor is clearly correct in associating the second part of this contrast with Marx and the Marxist tradition. It is a standard theme, at least of classical Marxism, that the revolution which inaugurates socialism is uniquely the revolution of self-consciousness. Among its many expressions in Marx’s work, there is the statement in the Manifesto that, in contrast to all previous historical movements, ‘the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority’. 42 The theme is captured in a light disguise in Engels’ insistence that the German working-class movement is the heir of classical German philosophy. 43 Moreover, a sense of ‘the unique function of consciousness in the class struggle of the proletariat’ is a central pillar of the intellectual structure of History and Class Consciousness.44 In this tradition, one might say, reason has to be realised in consciousness as the prelude to being realised in the objective world. The picture Hegel paints is strikingly different. In it historical actors are never fully self-aware, nor is the true historical meaning of what they do ever available to them at the time of acting. Even the most perceptive, the ‘world historical individuals’, move in a setting which is neither blankly opaque nor wholly transparent but in which, as one seems obliged to say with Taylor, they see through a glass darkly. 45 To note this contrast is to be made aware of what is only superficially a paradox, that Marx is in a certain sense more of an idealist than Hegel. The sense is that which is crucial for Marx’s own understanding of idealism, in which it is distinguished by the vital role it assigns to ideas in determining the course of history. What Hegel substitutes for self-conscious understanding in this role is, of course, as Taylor also indicates, the ‘cunning of reason’. The device has nothing mysterious or arbitrary about it in Hegel’s scheme. On the contrary, it is directly grounded in, and required by, his basic ontological principles. At their core there is the thesis that just as reason or thought ‘constitutes the substance of external things, so it is also the universal substance of what is spiritual’.46 In the form that is historically significant, reason is present in human beings as a ‘universal unconscious instinct’.47 Hence, it is enabled to serve as the force

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that gives an immanent shaping pressure, an inner directedness, to historical development. Thus, for instance, it is what makes the worldhistorical individuals irresistible to their contemporaries, thereby laying the foundations for their astounding achievements. In so far as these individuals pursue personal goals that promote the ends of rational Spirit, they speak with the true voices of their followers, revealing to them the secrets of their own hearts, bringing their hidden rationality closer to the light of day. Hence it is that people ‘flock to their standard, for it is they who express what the age requires’. 48 In this scheme all higher levels of self-consciousness are the fruits of historical action, not its presupposition or guiding light. They come on the scene with their revelation of meaning only when the episode in question has run its course. This is, moreover, what is signified by the image of the Owl of Minerva. It is by no means an image of quietism or of the impotence of theory. The function of the Owl is to embody the self-awareness of a way of life that has grown old and to prepare the ground for what will succeed it. The image is, after all, one of diurnal sequence in which the fall of dusk is eventually followed by a new dawn. Thus, the awareness that theory expresses at the end of one historical day is the starting point for the continuing struggle of Spirit on the next. Hegel’s position, in addition to being in a technical sense less idealistic is, it now appears, in an everyday one more realistic than is that of Marx. For if the stretch of history that separates us from both of them demonstrates anything, it is surely that the revolution of self-consciousness is never going to happen. It is as reasonable to expect to be saved by a god. Seeing through a glass more or less darkly is the only kind that is possible in history, and we shall never encounter individual or collective actors whose practice is fully informed by a scientific grasp of their situation. Hence, it may be well to turn to the more modest standards set by Hegel for what a dialectical emancipatory theory can achieve in its relationship with practice. What is evidently needed, to put the point more concretely, is some version of the cunning of reason. It is, of course, a device with which Marx was perfectly familiar. 49 Indeed, it plainly figures, though not by name, in his analysis of how British imperialism was ‘the unconscious tool of history’ in bringing about ‘a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia’.50 Instead of such isolated and opportunist, or at least not fully theorised, uses, it needs to be placed explicitly at the centre of the conceptual field and to be generalised in its application; that is to be extended to the revolution of socialism as well as that of capitalism. These steps will, however, bring with them some problems.

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For it should be borne in mind that the cunning of reason is not literally a device in the sense of a neutral instrument which is always ready to hand. Its use by Hegel presupposes, as the discussion has shown, a set of theoretical, and specifically ontological, assumptions. The question is how much of this groundwork has to be taken over for the kind of transfer now being proposed to be successful. It seems likely that a concept of Spirit as incorporating, and driven by, an impulse of reason, is indispensable. If, however, Spirit is read immanently and anthropologically in the way outlined earlier, this will not present a theoretical difficulty, but at most a shock to conventional ways of thinking and classifying. The real problem is whether one needs the assumption that reason is the substance not just of ‘spiritual’ but also of ‘external’ things. It is whether one has to take on the full Hegelian idealist ontology, its vision of the world of nature as well as that of human society. To put it another way, in the terminology suggested at the start of this essay, the issue is whether Spirit can after all be detached from the Idea so as to form the basis of a viable, self-contained theory. This is rather obviously, however, a complex, many-faceted issue which would have to be the subject of a separate inquiry from that conducted here.

The Way Ahead This essay has explored some aspects of the relationship between Hegel and Marxism for the light they shed on the project of a dialectical, emancipatory theory. The emphasis has been on the legacy to that project of Hegel and of the common ground he shares with Marx. Something should be said in conclusion about the very extensive elements specific to Marx which it needs to preserve and take forward. They have in part an overtly philosophical character. For there is, perhaps surprisingly, nothing in Hegel to match the philosophical anthropology of Marx’s early writings. Yet such a theory is essential for a comprehensive anthropological interpretation of Spirit. The task of dialectical synthesis that is indicated here still remains in all essentials to be achieved. What is still more obviously important to incorporate in it is the explanatory power of Marx’s analysis of capitalism. In this case it is not merely that, for more readily intelligible reasons, there is nothing remotely comparable in Hegel. There is also the specific value of the analysis in exposing and counteracting a large-scale misconception, indeed a fantasy, to which Hegel is subject. This is the fantasy of the rational state in capitalist society, the illusion that the contradictions of that society are susceptible to a political solution. That Hegel came to feel unease on the

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matter himself is shown by his, at least partial, awareness that the scheme of the Philosophy of Right founders on the rocks of injustice, alienation and poverty. There is also the evidence of his late and deep pessimism over the creeping invasion, more especially in France and Britain, of the political realm by the values and interests of civil society.51 This development, with its implication of the primacy of economic forces, is, of course wholly in line with, and indeed may be seen as a starting point and inspiration for, Marx’s analysis. Any judgement made from within the historical developments with which it deals has to be tentative and qualified. From our present vantage point in history, however, it seems hard to deny that, on the issues now in question, Hegel’s unofficial suspicions and Marx’s official convictions are well founded. Among the mass of confirmations of this, one may cite the apparent inability of the public realm in advanced capitalist countries to withstand the tide of commodification and privatisation. More significant still, there is the helplessness of the nationstate in the face of the now fully emergent logic of the global market. In this area in particular, Marx continues to speak with the greatest directness to our situation, and to offer the best basis for getting an explanatory grip on it. He was sharply aware of the ‘world market’ as the end-state in which for the first time ‘all contradictions come into play’, and in which crises are ‘the urge which drives towards the adoption of a new historic form’. 52 These insights have admittedly a programmatic, indeed a premature, character, and Marx was never in fact to carry through the systematic study of ‘the world market and crises’ which he projected. With the full emergence of what he was able only to anticipate, the time is surely ripe to complete his programme. If so, no greater theoretical contribution to the dialectic of human freedom could be conceived. The story sketched in this essay is essentially one of lost opportunities, but these do not, one should finally note, carry the tragic burden of being lost for ever. We still live in the world in which they arose, the world of modern capitalism to which Hegel and Marx are indispensable guides. The contradictions to which Marx refers remain wholly unresolved, while, on the other hand, we have no clear view of the workings of ‘the urge which drives towards the adoption of a new historical form’. This situation calls for neither bravado and hollow presumption nor for renunciation and despair. The one is as much a postdated cheque drawn on cognitive resources we do not actually possess as is the other. Once again, the more relaxed Hegelian view of what may properly be demanded of these resources will be helpful to bear in

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mind. We do not, and cannot, know where we are placed in history, and so have no compelling reason for supposing that the time is more inhospitable to our efforts than any other would be. It is also worth recalling a maxim of which, as the Philosophy of Right and Capital can testify, both Hegel and Marx were characteristically fond. ‘Hic Rhodus, hic salta,’ it enjoins us; that is to say, ‘Here is Rhodes, jump here’.

Notes 1 K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 100, 93–4, 161. 2 K. Marx, Capital, volume I, tr. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 102. 3 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel‘s Philosophy of Mind, tr. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 302–13. 4 W. Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, tr. J. M. Stewart and P. C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 372. 5 L. S. Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 178; F. C. Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 394. 6 K. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, tr. A. Jolin and J. O’Malley, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 11. 7 L. Feuerbach, ‘Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy’, in Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians, p. 156. 8 L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, tr. G. Eliot (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989), p. 270. 9 See J. E. Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Towards Dialectical Humanism, 1805– 1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 10 G. Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics, tr. R. Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1975), pp. 301, xxvii, 172, 361. 11 Lukács, The Young Hegel, pp. 357, 362–3. 12 G. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labour, tr. D. Fernbach (London: Merlin Press, 1980), pp. 54–5. 13 See D. Lamb, ‘Teleology: Kant and Hegel’, in S. Priest, ed., Hegel’s Critique of Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 173–84. 14 H. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 39, 78, 184, 126. 15 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. 161, 234. 16 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 38 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), pp. 104, 141, 180. 17 C. Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 92, 93, 373, 88, 375. 18 Taylor, Hegel, pp. 388, 424–6. 19 Taylor, Hegel, p. 425. 20 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 55.

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21 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 222, 265–7. 22 See G. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981); D MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). 23 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 73. 24 G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, tr. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 221. 25 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 32. 26 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 21. 27 K. Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 247. 28 K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955), p. 109. 29 K. Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, tr. F. Halliday (London: New Left Books, 1970), p. 42. 30 G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, tr. R. Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 3. 31 See, e.g., Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 3; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 66. 32 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 98–9. 33 For a fuller discussion see J. McCarney, Social Theory and the Crisis of Marxism (London: Verso, 1990), chs. 6–10. 34 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 46. 35 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 253. 36 Reported in D. Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), p. 69. 37 M. Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, tr. M. J. O’Connell et al. (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), pp. 215, 231, 213, 242, 212. 38 See, e.g., K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence (London: Lawrence & Wishart, n.d.), pp. 182, 375–6; K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), p. 18. 39 This development culminates in H. Marcuse, ‘Protosocialism and Late Capitalism: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis Based on Bahro’s Analysis’, in U. Wolter, ed., Rudolf Bahro: Critical Responses (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1980), pp. 24–48. 40 T. W. Adorno, ‘Resignation’, Telos, 35 (Spring 1978), p. 166. 41 T. W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, tr. G. Adey and D. Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 128. 42 K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1948), p. 140. 43 F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, 2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), p. 402. 44 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 68. 45 Taylor, Hegel, p. 393. 46 G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, tr. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), p. 57. 47 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 76.

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48 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, pp. 83–4. 49 See, e.g., Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 285. 50 K. Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, in K. Marx, Surveys from Exile (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 307. 51 See J. Habermas, Theory and Practice, tr. J. Viertel (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 170–94. 52 K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. M. Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 227–8.

4 Marx and Scientific Method: a Non-Metaphysical View Tony Burns

It is impossible to completely understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx. Lenin1

There are many who would agree with Lenin’s claim that it is first necessary to understand Hegel’s Logic if one wishes to understand Marx’s Capital.2 Indeed, Terrell Carver has pointed out that Lenin’s belief that ‘a study of Hegel is essential to an understanding of Marx’s is ‘now common place’.3 There is, however, a line of reasoning which flatly denies the truth of Lenin’s dictum. From this point of view, Marx’s economic thought might be said to stand alone. A familiarity with Hegel’s metaphysical system is by no means a necessary precondition for an adequate grasp of the basic principles of Marxist economic theory. Patrick Murray, for example, tells us that, against the advice of ‘Lenin’s famous aphorism’, a teacher of his once ‘insisted that one need not have read all of Hegel’s Logic, or even a little of Hegel, in order to perfectly well understand Capital’. Murray himself is of the opinion that there is at least some truth in this contention. 4 Following the example provided by Klaus Hartmann’s work on Hegel, we might describe such an interpretation of Marx as being a ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretation.5 Although in the final analysis this interpretation of Marx’s thought is not in our view defensible, nevertheless it is certainly of some interest. Even if in the end we reject it, a critical examination of it certainly does help to clarify our understanding of the relationship which exists between Marx and Hegel regarding questions of scientific method in the sphere of political economy. 79

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As most commentators have recognised, a key text for the discussion to follow is the Afterword to the second German edition of volume one of Marx’s Capital, which Marx published in 1873.6 It is in this text that Marx makes a clear distinction between two different aspects of his ‘method’, namely his ‘method of inquiry’, on the one hand, and his ‘method of presentation’ of results on the other. As Guglielmo Carchedi has rightly insisted, this distinction is of the greatest importance for our understanding of Marx’s method as a whole.7 It is, therefore, as well to record its significance at the outset.

Marx and Ricardo In response to the claim that Marx derived his method from Hegel, some commentators have argued that the source of this method lies, not in Hegel’s Logic, but rather in the economic writings of the members of the ‘classical’ school of political economy, and especially in the works of Ricardo. Joseph Schumpeter, for example, has insisted that it would be a ‘mistake’ to consider Marx’s relationship to Hegel as the ‘master key’ to Marx’s economic thought. For although there are certain ‘formal analogies’ between their respective methods of argument, and although Marx ‘liked to testify to his Hegelianism and to use Hegelian terminology’, this is nevertheless the full extent of Marx’s debt to Hegel. There is actually no more to the Marx–Hegel relationship than this. According to Schumpeter, the reality is that with respect to economic issues, and specifically ‘as a theorist’, Marx was in fact ‘a pupil of Ricardo’. This is certainly true in general. More to the point, though, in the present context, it is also true where the question of method is concerned. It is true ‘not only in the sense that his own argument evidently starts from Ricardo’s propositions’, but also in the ‘much more significant sense’ that Marx learned ‘the art of theorising’ from Ricardo. He always used Ricardo’s theoretical ‘tools’ and every theoretical problem ‘presented itself to him in the form of difficulties which occurred to him in his profound study of Ricardo’. 8 Schumpeter’s assertion should certainly not be accepted uncritically. It would be wrong to suggest that Marx simply accepts wholesale Ricardo’s methodological approach to questions of political economy. He is, for example, overtly critical of Ricardo’s method in his Theories of Surplus Value.9 Moreover, Schumpeter does not make plain whether, in his view, the influence of Ricardo on Marx applies to Marx’s method of inquiry, to his method of presentation of results, or to both. Having said this, however, it must be acknowledged that Schumpeter does have

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a point. Evidence in support of his claim that there is an important connection between Marx and Ricardo and the classical school of political economy certainly does exist. It is provided, for example, by what Marx has to say in the Afterword to volume I of Capital, where Marx refers with approval to a work by a Professor Sieber entitled David Ricardo’s Theory of Value and Capital, which discusses his own ‘theory of value, of money, and of capital’. According to Marx, in this work Sieber describes Capital, vol. I as a ‘necessary sequel’ to the teaching of Ricardo. Moreover, Sieber also maintains that the method adopted by Marx in Capital is ‘“the deductive method of the whole English school, a school whose failings and virtues are common to the best theoretic economists”’. It is of the greatest significance that Marx does not in any way object to this characterisation of his own method by Sieber. On the contrary, he explicitly describes Professor Sieber’s book as an ‘excellent work’ in which the author demonstrates a ‘consistent and firm grasp’ of his own ‘theoretical position’. 10 The full significance of this becomes apparent once we have established the nature of the method which is actually adopted by Ricardo in his The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.11 As Maurice Dobb has rightly pointed out, until the publication of this work in 1817 ‘there was nothing that could be called a single theoretical system of political economy’. For what characterised even the work of Adam Smith was ‘its unsystematic character so far as theory was concerned’. In contrast, Ricardian economic theory possesses ‘something of the neatness and precision of a mathematical demonstration’. 12 According to Eric Roll, Ricardo’s approach was more ‘scientific’, and relied more on the principle of ‘abstraction’, than Smith’s. To a far greater extent than Smith, therefore, Ricardo employed a ‘rigorous deductive method’ based on ‘a priori reasoning’.13 As Robert Heilbroner has indicated, this was Ricardo’s great contribution to the history of economic thought. Ricardo built a ‘model world’, a world which is ‘as basic, bare, unadorned and architectural’ as Euclid’s world, with its set of ‘pure geometrical propositions’. In short, Ricardo ‘gave the powerful tool of abstraction to economics’, a tool that is ‘essential if the distraction of everyday life is to be pierced and its underlying mechanism understood’.14 In so far as Marx’s method does indeed derive from that of Ricardo then, as Joan Robinson suggests, it follows that what Marx must have ‘learned from Ricardo’ was ‘the trick of setting up what we now call a model’, of ‘stating the assumptions’ and then drawing the inevitable logical ‘conclusions’ which follow from these assumptions. 15

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Ricardo and Marxism after Marx In the twentieth century, a number of commentators, many of whom are themselves Marxists, have highlighted this affinity between Marx’s method, on the one hand, and the Ricardian ‘deductive’ approach adopted by traditional economic theory on the other. Early evidence for this is provided by the debate which arose as a consequence of the publication of Eugene von Böhm-Bawerk’s Karl Marx and the Close of His System in 1896. In this work Böhm-Bawerk makes no distinction at all between Marx’s method of inquiry and his method of presentation of results. He attributes to Marx a unitary method which, he suggests, relies on the deployment of ‘a purely logical proof’. Böhm-Bawerk praises Marx highly for his ability to employ such a method. In his view, ‘the logical development and connection’ of Marx’s key theoretical concepts, at least in the ‘middle part of the Marxian system’, presents a ‘really imposing closeness and intrinsic consistency’. As a result, ‘the greater part’ of Marx’s system ‘is a masterpiece of close and forcible logic worthy of the intellect of its author’. 16 Böhm-Bawerk puts forward a number of criticisms of Marx in his book, of which just two will be singled out here. The first is his claim that because Marx relies heavily on the use of ‘syllogism’ and ‘tautology’ then we are justified in concluding that his method relies entirely on a priori reasoning. As he puts it, Marx ‘has evolved his doctrine entirely “out of the depths of his mind”’. There is, therefore, BöhmBawerk claims, a deplorable lack of emphasis in Marx on the need to base the principles of economic theory on the evidence provided by observation and ‘experience’.17 The second is that, despite his efforts to present a ‘system’ of economic thought which is based on the traditional notions of logical ‘demonstration’ and ‘proof’, nevertheless Marx’s economic thought is actually incoherent and self-contradictory. In particular, as is well known, Böhm-Bawerk accuses Marx of contradicting himself when discussing the so-called ‘transformation problem’ in Capital, vol. III. He insists that what Marx says here is logically inconsistent with the labour theory of value that is outlined in Capital, vol. I.18 As an account of Marx’s economic theory in general, Böhm-Bawerk’s book has a number of flaws, not least its identification of Marx’s method of presentation of results with Marx’s method of inquiry. However, from the standpoint of a non-metaphysical interpretation of Marx, what is important about the account which Böhm-Bawerk presents in his book is that, provided it is construed solely as an account of Marx’s method of presentation of results and nothing more, then it is in fact


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quite accurate. Support for this claim is provided by the fact that a number of the Marxist economists who replied to Böhm-Bawerk’s criticisms of Marx nevertheless acknowledged that his account of Marx’s method was in fact, at least in one sense, perfectly correct. For example, one of the first responses to Böhm-Bawerk’s book was Rudolf Hilferding’s Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx in 1904. In this work Hilferding has no objection at all to Böhm-Bawerk’s characterisation of Marx’s method, taken as a method of presentation of results. He accepts that in Capital Marx attempts to develop an internally coherent argument in a logical and systematic manner. Thus, for example, he is quite happy to acknowledge that, when discussing the ‘transformation problem’, Marx’s argument is indeed a logical ‘demonstration’, and that his conclusion is ‘no more than a logical deduction from his premises’. 19 His principal objection to Böhm-Bawerk’s criticisms of Marx lies simply in his belief that Böhm-Bawerk is wrong to claim that Marx’s economic theory is logically self-contradictory. On the contrary, Hilferding maintains, it is in fact the model of logical consistency which Böhm-Bawerk’s own interpretation of Marx’s method claims it ought to be. 20 Similar remarks might be made about Nikolai Bukharin’s response to the criticisms of Marx put forward by the Austrian School, in his The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class of 1919. In this book, Bukharin points out that the work of Ricardo ‘affords astonishing examples’ of the ‘abstract-deductive mode of study’ which is so characteristic of the classical school of political economy. It is this method, Bukharin suggests, which was later to be adopted, not only by Marx, but also by the Austrian School of political economy in the nineteenth century. As a result, Bukharin acknowledges, there is indeed a ‘formal similarity between this new attempt at abstract theory’ associated with the Austrian School ‘and Marxism’. This is so precisely because, like the members of the Austrian School, Marx also (although in a completely different way) was a follower of Ricardo. Marxism in general, therefore, itself ‘makes use’ of, and must make use of, the Ricardian ‘abstract method’.21 Like, Hilferding and Bukharin, I. I. Rubin is also critical of the account of Marx’s method that is presented by Böhm-Bawerk and the Austrian School. In his Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, published in 1928, Rubin follows Hilferding and objects to the fact that Böhm-Bawerk ignores altogether the ‘sociological’ underpinnings of Marx’s economic theory. For Böhm-Bawerk, Marx’s economic thought is ‘nothing more’ than a purely logical proof. Rubin acknowledges Böhm-Bawerk’s praise of Marx’s logical rigour. He insists, however, that the real ‘power’ of Marx’s theory does not ‘reside in its internal logical consistency’, but, rather, in the

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fact that the theory is ‘thoroughly saturated with complex, rich socialeconomic content taken from reality and elucidated by the power of abstract thought’. It should be noted, though, that Rubin makes no objection to Böhm-Bawerk’s account of Marx’s method of presentation. He accepts completely Böhm-Bawerk’s claim that Marx’s method of presentation is based on the principle of ‘internal logical consistency’. He acknowledges that ‘at first glance’ Marx’s theoretical concepts all appear to be ‘logical emanations’ of the concept of value. Every ‘later concept carries the stamp of the previous one’. Thus, one’s ‘first encounter with Marx’s theoretical system’ might well ‘lead to agreement with BöhmBawerk’s view that Marx’s system is a logical-deductive development of abstract concepts and their immanent, purely logical development’.22 A similar interpretation of Marx’s method is presented by Henryk Grossmann in his classic study on The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System of 1929. According to Grossmann, ‘Marx’s proof procedure’ has the character of a logical ‘deduction’. Thus, for example, Marx’s theory of breakdown ‘was neither a generalisation from purely empirical observations nor an elaboration of Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction’. It was, rather, ‘derived through deduction as a self-evident consequence of the accumulation of capital on the basis of the law of value’. Grossmann insists that the Marxist method in the study of economics could not possibly be an ‘empirical or a statistical one’. This is so because economists must ‘show the logically necessary character’ of their basic propositions. On this issue, Grossmann even goes so far as to agree with Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School generally that ‘empirically ascertainable relationships’ among economic facts ‘remain theoretically problematic’ as long as, in Hayek’s words, they are not reducible to underlying patterns ‘whose logically necessary character emerges independently of their statistical determination’. For Grossmann, then, Marx’s Capital constitutes ‘an abstract deductively elaborated theory’ in the traditional Aristotelian or Euclidian sense. 23 This is also the view advanced by both Karl Korsch and Paul Sweezy. In an Introduction to Marx’s Capital first published in 1932, Korsch maintains that Marx’s method could fruitfully be compared with the ‘modern axiomatic method of the mathematical sciences’, at least in so far as it is a method which uses a ‘logical-constructive procedure’ to ‘deduce from certain simple principles the results already arrived at through detailed research’. According to Korsch, therefore, there is nothing especially ‘Hegelian’ about Marx’s method. This method is nothing more than a ‘strictly systematic logical-deductive treatment of


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concepts’.24 In his The Theory of Capitalist Development, first published in 1942, Sweezy maintains that Marx’s economic methodology appears ‘strikingly similar to that of his classical predecessors and his neoclassical successors’. This is so because Marx was a strong adherent of the ‘abstract-deductive method’ which was such a ‘marked characteristic of the Ricardian school’. 25 More recently, such a view is also to be found in the writings of two of the most influential commentators on the works of Marx in the last three decades, Lucio Colletti and Louis Althusser. According to Colletti, Marx’s references in the Afterword to the ‘breaking of the ‘mystical shell’ of Hegel’s philosophy constitute a clear reference the ‘recovery of the principle of identity and non-contradiction’ in Marx’s thought.26 It follows from this, however, or so Colletti maintains, that Marx’s method in Capital must inevitably recognise ‘the irreplaceable role of the logicodeductive process’. Marx’s analysis in Capital begins with a study of the ‘form of value’, or the ‘commodity form’. It is from this that the ‘logicodeductive course of the work proceeds’. First, ‘one begins with the commodity’, then ‘money’, and finally, ‘capital’. Each of these economic categories is a link in a ‘deductive chain’, understood in the traditional Aristotelian sense. It is for precisely this reason, Colletti points out, that Marx acknowledges in the Afterword that it may well appear to his readers that they have before them nothing more than an a priori construction.27 This assessment of Marx’s method is also shared by Louis Althusser, who is well known for his attempt to minimise the extent to which Hegel might be thought to have had an influence on the thinking of Marx, especially with respect to matters of science and method. According to Althusser, what we find in Marx’s Capital is ‘an apodictic arrangement’ or ‘demonstrational discourse’ of concepts, which amounts to a ‘proof’, that is to say a ‘logical order’, or ‘deduction’ of the fundamental categories’ of Marx’s economic thought. Needless to say, though, none of this has anything to do with the philosophy of Hegel. For ‘Marx’s discourse is in principle foreign to Hegel’s’.28 This, of course, leaves open the question of what Marx’s original source actually was. With respect to this question Althusser seems unable to make up his mind. At times, like J. Zeleny, he suggests that there is no such source. What Marx does in Capital is ‘invent a new form of order for axiomatic analysis’, even though he is actually unaware that this is what he is doing. 29 At other times, however, he suggests that there is indeed an ultimate source for Marx’s method. Regarding the question of the precise location of this source, however, one again Althusser is somewhat hesitant. As is

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well known, Althusser has a tendency to emphasise strongly the links that exist between the views of Marx and those of Spinoza rather than Hegel. He insists that ‘we can regard Spinoza as Marx’s only direct ancestor from the philosophical standpoint’. 30 On the other hand, though, he also acknowledges the affinity that exists between Marx and Ricardo regarding questions of method. For example, he points out that it is precisely Ricardo’s merit that he ‘conceived Political Economy in the true form of scientificity’, that is to say, ‘as a unified system of concepts which expresses the internal essence of its object’.31 At one point he even describes Marx as ‘Ricardo set in motion’. 32 There is then, we may conclude, a widespread body of opinion, specifically amongst a number of well-known Marxist commentators, to which a non-metaphysical reading of Marx’s views on method might appeal for support. This body of opinion, as we have seen, locates the origins of Marx’s method, not in the philosophy of Hegel, but rather in the economic thought of Ricardo and the classical school of political economy.

Marx and the Role of Definitions in Science One implication of such a non-metaphysical interpretation of Marx is that it sheds new light on the role which definitions have to play in Marx’s method. From this point of view it is the task of economic theory to work out the logical implications of certain basic axioms or postulates which are, at the outset, assumed to be true by definition. The non-metaphysical interpretation attributes just such a procedure to Marx. It suggests, as Joan Robinson points out, that the method of presentation of results employed in Marx’s Capital is indeed ‘Ricardian’, in the specific sense that it seeks to present a simplified or abstract ‘model’ which captures the essential character of the capitalist mode of production, a model which Marx makes increasingly more complex and ‘realistic’ as he develops his analysis in accordance with what is usually referred to as the method of ‘successive approximation’. This aspect of Marx’s method has been well captured by Duncan Foley, who claims that in Marx’s economic thought the key component concepts actually ‘define each other’ as elements in a ‘self-determined system’. They hang together in such a way that it is ‘impossible to understand’ any one of these concepts ‘outside the system comprising all of them’.33 As Foley points out, one possible objection to this (of which Marx himself was very well aware) is that such a method of procedure might strike some people as ‘circular and tautological, a mere spinning out of logical


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categories’.34 The final outcome of the adoption of such a method is, as Marx himself points out in the Afterword, that it may appear that what we have before us is indeed nothing but a mere a priori construction, that is to say, an arbitrary system of propositions, all of which are true by definition, and none of which can tell us anything about the real world. It is, therefore, quite important to understand Marx’s views on the role that definitions have to play in science. It is a common place of twentieth-century linguistic philosophy (although one which has been questioned by a few philosophers at least) that there are just two types of meaningful statement: analytic statements, on the one hand, and synthetic statements, on the other. From the standpoint of this distinction, it is quite impossible for a statement which is true by definition to provide substantive, ‘scientific’ knowledge of reality. Marx rejects this distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, as it has been understood by philosophers from the time of Kant onwards. He is of the opinion that it is certainly possible for a statement to be true by definition and yet nevertheless at the same time provide us with substantive knowledge of the real world. That this is so is evident from some of the remarks which he makes in Capital about the role of tautologies in science. For example, when discussing the nature of capitalist production in volume I of Capital, on one occasion Marx points out that since ‘the value of the constituent elements of the product is equal to the value of the advanced capital, it is mere tautology to say that the excess of the value of the product over the value of its constituent elements is equal to the expansion of the capital advanced or to the surplus value produced’. Nevertheless, he goes on to insist, ‘we must examine this tautology a little more closely’. 35 For this tautology encapsulates the key to our understanding of the nature of capitalist production itself. Similarly, when discussing the long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall in Capital, vol. III, Marx insists that this is a ‘law’ which intrinsic to capitalism itself. That there is a ‘tendency’ for the rate of profit to fall is a consequence of the essential ‘nature’ of the ‘capitalist mode of production’. According to Marx, it is a ‘logical necessity that in its development the general average rate of surplus value must express itself in a falling general rate of profit’. As Marx himself recognises, this ‘is indeed a tautology’. Nevertheless, ‘the fact that this decrease occurs at all arises from the nature of the development of the capitalist process of production’. 36 On this interpretation, then, Marx is not opposed to the employment of tautologies or definitional truths in science. On the contrary, they have a fundamentally important part to play in the process by means of

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which genuinely scientific knowledge is produced. This is so in two senses, each of which relates to a different aspect of Marx’s method. In the first place it is the task of all scientific knowledge to grasp the ‘essential nature’ of its object. The task of science is to establish an adequate definition of the concept which is used to refer to this object. In the case of Marx’s political economy, this object is the capitalist mode of production. Hence, according to Marx, it is above all ‘necessary to produce a precise analysis of the concept of capital, since it is the basic concept of modern economics, just as capital itself, which is its abstract reflection, is the basis of bourgeois society’.37 Such definitions are the outcome of the ‘method of analysis’ which Marx refers to in the Afterword, a method which is intimately associated with the empirical observation of the object in question. In the second place, it is definitions of this sort which constitute the starting point for a genuinely scientific ‘method of presentation’ of the results of such a process of empirical investigation. According to a non-metaphysical reading of Marx, then, Andrew Sayer is quite right to say that, for Marx, ‘the entire three volumes of Capital amount, in effect, to a definition of capital’.38 Similarly, both Tom Sowell and Joan Robinson are right to say that the labour theory of value which Marx outlines in Capital, vol. I is (in one sense at least) simply ‘a matter of definition’. 39 As Allen Wood has pointed out, Marx’s ‘exposition’ of the labour theory of value is actually ‘a deductive argument’, a logical working out of the implications of Marx’s initial definition of the concept of ‘value’. This ‘argument’, Wood insists, looks very much ‘like an attempt to deduce a universal theory of prices a priori from a few theses about the general nature of commodity exchange’. 40 It follows from this, of course, that a proponent of such a reading of Marx would find it extremely difficult to accept Geert Reuten’s recent contention that Marx’s method of presentation is ‘certainly not the kind of axiomatic analysis that proceeds from definitions’, or Reuten’s contention that ‘Marx does not define.41 Similarly, it would also be difficult to accept Daniel Little’s contention that the central propositions of Marx’s Capital ‘are in no sense a priori truths’.42 On the contrary, proponents of this interpretation of Marx would therefore entirely agree with Bertell Ollman’s claim that, in so far as Capital is concerned, ‘strictly speaking, all Marx’s laws are tautologies’.43 Some commentators would, of course, definitely reject this view. J. Zeleny, for example, maintains that what is significant about Marx’s method is precisely Marx’s efforts to ‘avoid tautologies’. 44 James Farr, also, would take exception to Ollman’s claim. Indeed, he describes


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Ollman’s assertion as being ‘patently false’. 45 It seems clear however that, like Zeleny, Farr’s reason for objecting to Ollman’s claim is that he thinks that if it were established that the propositions of Capital were indeed tautologies, then we would have to accept that they tell us nothing about the real world. According to Farr, these propositions are evidently not tautologies because their truth ‘depends upon ‘empirical data’ and because, for Marx, it is ‘facts’ which ‘furnish the test of theories’.’46 In other words, Farr’s objection to Ollman is one which is based on an acceptance of the conventional analytic–synthetic distinction referred to above. It might, of course, be said that there is a sense in which Farr does have a point here. Marx would certainly wish to make a distinction between statements which tell us nothing at all about the real world, on the one hand, and statements which encapsulate substantive or factual knowledge of that world on the other. However, in Marx’s view, the way to record this distinction is not to differentiate between those statements which are tautologies and those which are not. What we must do, rather, is differentiate between statements which are ‘empty’ or ‘mere’ tautologies and statements which are not. The former are entirely arbitrary and have no grounding whatsoever in empirical observation. The latter, although they are indeed tautologies, are genuinely ‘scientific’, precisely because they do possess such a grounding in an empirical investigation of reality. They are in fact the products of such a process of empirical investigation. This aspect of Marx’s thinking has been captured very well by Andrew Sayer, who has pointed out that if we refer to the theoretical statements of Capital as ‘tautologies’, then it might well ‘appear that they are conceptual necessities and nothing more. Thus Marx’s theory has ‘the appearance of what Marx himself called an a priori construction’. According to Sayer, however, this is not strictly accurate. For Marx evidently believes that ‘some conceptual necessities have a real basis’. These conceptual necessities are ‘based on real, necessary connections’. In Marx’s economic theory these real, necessary relationships are and need to be ‘taken up into the definition of capital’. The theoretical propositions of Capital, therefore, although they certainly are tautologies, are evidently not ‘just’ tautologies, for if they were then ‘science could develop simply by inventing tautologies freely at will’, and this is something to which Marx is evidently opposed. 47 It is for this reason that so many commentators, like Sayer and Collier, have sought to locate Marx’s views on science and method against the background of that school of thinking in the philosophy of science and social science which is usually referred to as ‘scientific realism’. For it is

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a basic principle of modern ‘scientific realism’ that the task of all scientists is, in the words of Roy Bhaskar, ‘to discover the real essences of things a posteriori and to express their discoveries in real definitions’.48 Moreover, like Marx, scientific realists such as Bhaskar also reject the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths as this distinction has traditionally been understood. As Bhaskar himself puts it, the explanatory propositions of science may certainly be regarded as analytic truths. They are, however, analytic truths which are ‘arrived at in the transitive process of science a posteriori, by empirical means’.49 If anyone who thinks that the production of such truths is the main aim of science is a ‘scientific realist’, 50 then it is certainly correct to include Marx in this category. 51

Marx and Traditional Aristotelian Logic A non-metaphysical reading of Marx is based on the assumption that in Capital, vol. I, and like his classical predecessors in the discipline of economics, Marx relies heavily on the canons and procedures of traditional logic – the formal logic first developed by Aristotle, and later employed in classical Euclidian geometry. It follows from this, of course, that the non-metaphysical reading has no sympathy for the view that Marx categorically rejects this traditional logic, or for the view that the development of Marx’s argument in Capital is based on the principles of an alternative logic derived from Hegel, namely ‘dialectical logic’.52 On this interpretation, then, when Marx employs terms such as ‘logical’, ‘a priori’, ‘tautology’, ‘definition’ in Capital he is using these terms in their traditional Aristotelian sense. 53 We may illustrate Marx’s employment of the principles of traditional logic in Capital by an example, namely the argument in Capital, vol. III, which Marx uses in an attempt to establish that there is a long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall.54 The conclusion of this argument amounts in effect to a working out of the logical implications of the definitions which Marx provides for certain of his key theoretical terms. Paul Sweezy has suggested, quite rightly, that the ‘theoretical analysis’ which Marx goes through in order to establish this result is based on the ‘definitions’ which Marx gives to key expressions such as ‘rate of surplus value’, ‘rate of profit’ and ‘the organic composition of capital’. Sweezy also points out that these expressions can all be represented in ‘mathematical language’. The mathematical formulae which result can then be manipulated, in accordance with the rules of basic algebra, to establish a ‘proof’ of Marx’s law, as follows.


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Let s stand for surplus value, c stand for constant capital and v stand for variable capital. Further, let s’ stand for the rate of surplus value, q stand for the organic composition of capital, and p stand for the rate of profit. Then s’ = s/v; q = c/(c + v); and p = s/(c + v). Given these definitions, it follows that: (1) p = s/c + v; (2) s/c + v = sv/v(c + v); (3) sv/v(c + v) = sc + sv − sc/v(c + v); (4) sc + sv − sc/v(c + v) = s(c + v) − sc/v(c + v); (5) s(c + v) − sc/v(c + v) = s(c + v)/v(c + v) − sc/v(c + v); (6) s(c + v)/v(c + v) − sc/v(c + v) = s/v − s/v ⋅ c/(c + v); (7) s/v − s/v ⋅ c/(c + v) = s’ − s’ ⋅ q; (8) s’ − s’ ⋅ q = s’(1 − q); (9) Therefore, p = s’(1 − q).55 Here the rate of profit is logically demonstrated to be a function of the rate of surplus value and the organic composition of capital. In brief, Marx’s argument is that if the organic composition of capital rises then, other things being equal (ceteris paribus) the rate of profit must necessarily fall, provided the rate of surplus value remains constant. As both Daniel Little and George McCarthy have pointed out, and as Marx himself acknowledges, the necessity here is strict logical necessity, in the sense of this term understood by traditional formal logic. 56 From the standpoint of a non-metaphysical interpretation of Marx, what is interesting about this is (to employ a phrase of J. Steindl’s) ‘the rigid mathematical demonstration of the argument’. 57 It is the fact that the argument evidently relies on the demonstrative procedures of traditional formal logic. The very fact that Marx’s argument can be presented in this way indicates that, throughout, Marx is presupposing the validity of the conventional principles of logic, of demonstration and of proof. We have already seen that Marx describes the argument which he uses to demonstrate this ‘law’ as a ‘tautology’. The suggestion here then, once again, is that he means by this exactly what anyone else who subscribes to the principles of traditional logic would mean by it. Roy Bhaskar has contrasted Marx’s ‘empirically controlled mode of inquiry’ with his ‘quasi-deductive method of exposition’.58 A non-metaphysical interpretation of Marx would maintain that there is nothing at all ‘quasi-deductive’ about Marx’s method of exposition. As we have just seen, Marx’s demonstration of the law asserting the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is ‘deductive, pure and simple’. It is a matter of what Bertell Ollman has described as Marx’s ‘a priori arithmetic’.59 A nonmetaphysical reading, therefore, would entirely agree with James Bonar when he says that Marx’s economics ‘is as strictly deductive as Ricardo’s and on the whole follows the same lines’.60 In the light of these remarks, a proponent of such an interpretation of Marx would find it difficult to accept Tony Smith’s claim that Marx’s method of presentation in Capital does indeed constitutes an application of the principles of ‘dialectical logic’, and that the ‘derivation of

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one categorial level from another’ is based on a ‘systematic necessity’ which is ‘not that which is found in the deductive systems of formal logic’.61 It would also, from this point of view, be difficult to accept Chris Arthur’s contention that Marx’s Capital is not a deductive system ‘in which an axiom is made the basis for a sequence of inferences that formally follow from it, the result being, as it is said, already contained in the premises’.62 According to the non-metaphysical interpretation, at least in so far as the method of presentation of results is concerned (though not, of course, the method of inquiry), this is exactly what Marx’s Capital is.

Rationalism and Empiricism in Marx’s View of Scientific Method In so far as the discipline of economics generally is concerned, the ‘rationalist’ nature of its basic methodological approach has long been recognised. As J. L. Hanson has pointed out, the ‘traditional method of pure economics’ has always ‘been deductive’.63 It could be argued that it is David Ricardo who was the original founder of this traditional approach to the study of economics. In the twentieth century, at least in England, this particular approach is, perhaps, classically exemplified in the work of Lionel Robbins. 64 According to Robbins, for example, the propositions of economic theory are ‘obviously’ logical ‘deductions’ from a series of basic ‘postulates’. 65 In Robbins’ view, as Hollis and Nell put it, ‘economic theory consists of the logical consequences of conceptual definitions’. 66 The fact that this is so has led Caldwell to describe Robbins’ approach to the study of economics, and hence the traditional approach generally, as being one that is fundamentally ‘rationalist’ and ‘a priorist’.67 We have seen, however, that the similarities between Marx’s own approach to the study of economics and that adopted by the classical tradition originating in the work of Ricardo are very great. This raises the issue of whether Marx’s views on science and method are themselves ‘rationalist’ or ‘a priorist’. Aristotelian logic was considered by the rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century to be a necessary vehicle for the communication of all genuinely scientific knowledge. The procedure of starting out from ‘definitions’ and then working out the logical implications of one’s key theoretical terms so that the final result comprises a logically interconnected ‘system’ of ideas is the hallmark of philosophical rationalism. Althusser’s view that the source for Marx’s views on method lies in the work of Spinoza is certainly far less plausible than the claim that


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this source lies in the work of Ricardo. Nevertheless it does have the merit of associating Marx’s views on science and method with the rationalist philosophical tradition. This is a tradition for which, as John Nason has pointed out, all knowledge is ‘demonstrable in terms of pure concepts’. Hence, from this point of view, logical, ‘deduction’ or demonstration, in the Aristotelian sense, ‘is the only scientific method’. 68 To the extent to which Marx’s method of presentation of results relies upon such a procedure, then, it might indeed be said that there is a rationalist component to Marx’s views on correct scientific method. It is evident, however, that this is not the whole story. For to characterise Marx in this way, as some sort of extreme rationalist, would be to focus exclusively on his method of presentation of results, and to ignore completely his method of inquiry. Marx himself would, of course, have objected strongly to any interpretation of his own views on method which presented him as a ‘Hegelian’ in this particular sense. That this is so is evident from the comments which he makes on the ‘metaphysics of political economy’ in The Poverty of Philosophy, and from his criticisms of Adolf Wagner in his later Notes on Adolph Wagner.69 In the former work, for example, Marx explicitly criticises Proudhon for presenting the ‘economic categories’ in a Hegelian manner, that is to say, in a way which ‘makes them look as if they had newly blossomed forth in an intellect of pure reason’. Proudhon, Marx suggests, sees actual social relations as the ‘incarnation’ of the economic categories. Like Hegel, therefore, he holds things ‘upside down’. He does not realise that these economic categories, which he considers to be ‘fixed, immutable and eternal’, are actually nothing more than the ‘theoretical expressions’ or ‘abstractions’ of certain specific, and historically transitory, ‘social relations of production’. 70 Thus, Marx goes on to say, Proudhon shares ‘all of the illusions of speculative philosophy in his treatment of the economic categories’. Like Hegel, he ‘mixes up ideas and things’. What he presents us with, therefore, is nothing more than ‘Hegelian junk’.71 Similarly, in the later work, Marx brings much the same sort of criticism against Wagner. He describes Wagner as an ‘obscurantist’ who has ‘not once noticed’ that his ‘analytic method’, that is to say his method of inquiry, ‘has nothing in common with the academic German method of connecting concepts’. According to Marx, Wagner signally fails to appreciate that his method of inquiry does ‘not start out from “concepts”’.72 It is, presumably, for precisely this reason that Marx, in the Afterword, takes great care to point out to his readers that it is only his method of presentation of results which is ‘dialectical’.

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His method of inquiry certainly is not. Indeed, Marx praises one of his reviewers for his appreciation of the fact that the method of inquiry is, not ‘idealist’ or ‘German dialectical’, but ‘severely realistic’.73 In short, it is a method which presupposes the need for the empirical observation and investigation of reality. This emphasis on the need for empirical observation and investigation in science provides a necessary corrective to the over-simplified view that Marx’s method is purely rationalist in orientation. Indeed, a number of commentators have gone so far as to argue, on these grounds, that Marx is actually a philosophical empiricist,74 or even a positivist.75 It is certainly the case that a non-metaphysical interpretation of Marx is sympathetic to the broad thrust of such a suggestion. It would, however, as James Farr has rightly pointed out, be a mistake to conclude that just because Marx’s method of inquiry is empirical, it is legitimate for us to conclude that Marx must be an empiricist – for ‘being empirical’ is not at all ‘the same thing as being empiricist’. The empiricist conception of science is certainly not alone in emphasising the importance of empirical observation for the scientific enterprise. This is also true, as Farr has indicated, of the doctrine known as scientific realism. 76 As a matter of fact Marx has much more in common with the latter doctrine than he does with the former. In particular he has little sympathy either for the empiricist theory of causality or for the empiricist view of the ontological status of theoretical entities in science. Moreover, as we have seen, and unlike empiricists, Marx acknowledges that definitions (real definitions) have an important part to play in scientific explanation. With respect to all of these issues, then, as a number of commentators have noted, Marx’s attitude is basically that of a scientific realist rather than an empiricist or positivist.

Marx and the Dialectic A non-metaphysical reading of Marx has clear implications for our understanding of the role which dialectics, or dialectical thinking, has to play within Marx’s economic thought. Of great significance, in this connection, is the fact that in his methodological writings, and especially in the Afterword, Marx has a tendency to associate the term ‘dialectical’ primarily with his ‘method of presentation of results’. As Scott Meikle has pointed out, this immediately raises the question, ‘Is dialectic, then, simply a method of expounding, or presenting results?’ Is there no more to Marx’s dialectic than this?77 This issue is one which has been discussed by Howard Williams, who insists that for Marx ‘dialectic properly


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describes only his method of argument’ and that it is indeed the case that Marx ‘confines his dialectic to the method of presentation’. 78 In the Afterword Marx points out that a review of Capital, vol. I (by I. I. Kaufmann), in the European Messenger of St. Petersburg, describes his method of presentation as being ‘German-dialectical’. Marx does not quarrel with this description. He acknowledges that the reviewer in question presents an account of his method of presentation which is substantially accurate. It is a method which if applied properly will present the results in such a way that ‘it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction’. Marx emphasises that it is precisely this which constitutes the essence of his own ‘dialectic method’. Moreover, he is aware that this method of presentation might lead to possible misunderstandings. For example, at one point in the Grundrisse he suggests that at some future date he will need to revise his manuscript ‘to correct the idealist manner of the presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations and of the dialectic of these concepts’. 79 We have already noted that a number of commentators consider Marx’s method of presentation to be basically Aristotelian or Euclidian in character. It is a method of presentation which relies heavily on deductive reasoning in the sense in which traditional logic understands that term. We have also noted that in the Afterword Marx does not actually object when Professor Sieber describes his method of presentation as being ‘the deductive method of the whole English School’. It would seem to follow from this that Marx sees no necessary incompatibility between the apparently quite different descriptions of his method of presentation which are given in these two separate reviews of his work by Kaufmann and Sieber. A good case could be made out, therefore, that for Marx the method of presentation of results which he freely acknowledges is ‘German-dialectical’, on the one hand, and the traditional ‘deductive’ method of presentation associated with the classical school of political economy, on the other, are actually one and the same thing.80 From the standpoint of a non-metaphysical interpretation, then, Marx’s ‘dialectic’ is a purely conceptual dialectic which has to do solely with the logical relationships which exist between the key theoretical concepts in Capital. A commitment on Marx’s part to a dialectical method of presentation does not, therefore, imply a commitment to any particular position with respect to questions of ontology. It has no metaphysical implications at all. As Howard Williams has claimed, Marx’s dialectic is ‘not an ontological or “materialist” dialectic’. 81 Moreover,

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Marx’s method of presentation of results is not a method which is founded on an alternative ‘dialectical logic’. Nor does it imply an abandonment of the principles of traditional formal logic and demonstrative reasoning. This amounts to saying that if Marx’s method of presentation is ‘Hegelian’ then it is so only in a severely emasculated sense. It is so only to the extent that Hegel himself, as Marx understands him, might be said to be committed to these same principles. This is something which has been noted by Maurice Dobb. According to Dobb, it is certainly ‘desirable’ to ‘appreciate the specifically Hegelian roots’ of Marx’s method. Dobb acknowledges, however, that although desirable, strictly speaking it is not actually necessary to do this in order to understand Marx’s economic theory. For all that this does is enable us ‘to catch the finer shades of meaning’ of the component concepts of Marx’s theoretical vocabulary.82 According to a non-metaphysical interpretation of Marx’s thought, it is in the light of these remarks that we should interpret and evaluate the assertion which Marx makes later on in the Afterword that he had ‘here and there’, in the chapter on the theory of value, ‘flirted’ or ‘coquetted’ with ‘the modes of expression’ peculiar to Hegel and the Hegelian philosophy. 83 Marx’s use of the words ‘here and there’ and ‘flirted’ or ‘coquetted’ in this context suggest, it could be argued, that the influence of Hegel upon him, in comparison with that of Ricardo, is minimal. To suggest otherwise, as John Rees has recently done, would be to exaggerate greatly.84 This emphasis on the idea that the dialectic is primarily a method of presentation of results seems to suggest that, for Marx, the reasons for adopting a dialectical approach are not really scientific at all. They are, rather, more literary or stylistic. As Scott Meikle has pointed out, some people might take the view that the dialectical approach, understood as a method of presentation of results, is indeed a matter of ‘mere style and arrangement’. Marx adopts such an approach because it is ‘more to the taste of the nineteenth century German sensitivity than “the gross English manner”’.85 Meikle himself emphatically rejects such an interpretation. A number of other commentators, however, have accepted it. According to Duncan Foley, for example, Marx’s dialectic method is ‘primarily a matter of style and presentation’. 86 From this point of view, as Paul Mattick Jr. has put it, ‘Hegel’s dialectical logic provided Marx with an irresistibly attractive rhetoric for the depiction of the system of economic categories’ in Capital.87 Indeed, according to James White, when the first French translation of Capital volume one was produced in 1872–5, ‘any trace’ which remained of Hegel’s philosophical vocabulary


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from the earlier editions of Capital had by that time come to perform a ‘purely stylistic function’. In White’s view, therefore, this French translation of Capital represents the culmination of the ‘task of excising the philosophical component’ from his thought which Marx progressively undertook between 1857–9 and 1875, a process which ‘was far from complete’ when the first German edition of Capital was published in 1867.88 Moreover, Meikle, Foley, Mattick and White are not by any means the first to present such an interpretation of Marx’s thought. This interpretation of Marx’s attitude towards ‘dialectics’ actually has a long pedigree. Karl Korsch, for example, maintained in the 1930s that Marx’s employment of the phraseology of Hegelian metaphysics in Capital amounts to nothing more than a stylistic ‘device’, ‘a sophisticated kind of metaphorical usage’.89 And Georg Lukács also refers (critically) to this interpretation of Marx’s attitude towards the dialectic in the Preface to his History and Class Consciousness in 1922. In Lukács’ opinion far too much importance is attached to Marx’s comments in the Afterword, especially the phrase where Marx ‘talks of ‘flirting’ with Hegel’s ‘mode of expression’. One consequence of this, Lukács suggests, is that it ‘has frequently misled people into believing that for Marx the dialectic was no more than a superficial stylistic ornament’. 90 From the standpoint of a non-metaphysical interpretation of his thought, of course, this is exactly what Marx’s employment of Hegel’s philosophical vocabulary in Capital is. On the other hand, though, it is evident that things are not quite as simple as this. For someone who subscribed to a non-metaphysical reading of Marx interpretation would wish to make a clear distinction between the method of presentation of results which Marx actually adopts in Capital and the Hegelian phraseology with which this method is usually associated. It is evident that the method itself, whether or not we describe it as ‘dialectical’, is in Marx’s view an essential prerequisite for the communication of a ‘scientific’ understanding of the nature of the capitalist mode of production. There is undeniably, therefore, a sense in which Ali Shamsavari, for example, is quite right to insist that ‘what Marx means by “presentation” is not formalism or style, but the very comprehension of the phenomena resulting from the inquiry’.91 According to a non-metaphysical reading of Marx, therefore, it is really only the characterisation of this method by reference to the vocabulary of Hegelian metaphysics, as being specifically a ‘dialectical’ method, that is unnecessary. It is Marx’s employment of this particular descriptive label, together with the rest of the Hegelian

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phraseology in Capital, that is alleged to be a matter of literary style and nothing more.

Conclusion Until quite recently, the history of Marxism in the twentieth century has often been seen as an ongoing debate between just two different and opposed interpretations of the views of Marx. The first of these is captured very well by the descriptive label of ‘orthodox Marxism’ or ‘dialectical materialism’. The second is usually referred to as ‘Western’ or ‘Hegelian Marxism’. There is, however, a third alternative, a nonmetaphysical reading of Marx, the latest development of which, in the last ten years or so, has been the development of ‘analytical Marxism’ or ‘rational choice Marxism’.92 From the standpoint of such a nonmetaphysical interpretation of Marx, what is particularly interesting about the ongoing debate between the proponents of the first two schools of thought is those respects in which they agree, rather than the respects in which they differ. It is the fact that they both appeal, in one way or another, to the ideas of Hegel. Each of these schools maintains, though in a different way, that the link between Marx and Hegel is an important one and that we cannot understand Marx’s thinking generally, and especially Marxist economic theory, without first understanding Hegel, and without appreciating the fundamental importance of Marx’s intellectual debt to him. As against this, the non-metaphysical interpretation of Marx’s economic thought which we have discussed locates Marx specifically against the background provided by the history of economic thought rather than philosophy. It therefore rejects completely this contention that Marx cannot be understood without Hegel. In this respect at least, although not in others, it resembles the approach to Marx adopted by analytical Marxism.93 Someone who subscribed to this non-metaphysical interpretation of Marx would certainly agree with Terrell Carver’s claim that the belief that ‘a study of Hegel is essential to an understanding of Marx’ is in fact ‘profoundly unhelpful’ or even ‘seriously misleading’. This is so because this belief seriously overrates the importance of Hegel’, and even the notion of the ‘dialectic’, for an understanding of Marx’s economic thought.94 Such a person would also, therefore, agree with Carver’s contention that ‘neither “the dialectic” nor “Hegel’s Logic” represents a master key to Marx’s work’. 95 A discussion of the merits of this non-metaphysical interpretation of Marx’s views on scientific method is something which will have to be left for another occasion.


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Notes 1 V. I. Lenin, ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic’, Collected Works, 38, Philosophical Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), p. 180. 2 See, for example, C. Arthur, ‘Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital’, in F. Moseley, ed., Marx’s Method in Capital: A Reexamination (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), pp. 63–4; G. Kitching, Marxism and Science: Analysis of an Obsession (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 26; M. Nicolaus, ‘Introduction’ to K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), tr. M. Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 26, 32, 43, 60; R. Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ (London: Pluto Press, 1980), pp. xi–xiv; A. Shamsavari, Dialectics and Social Theory: The Logic of Capital (London: Merlin Books, 1991); R. Winfield, ‘The Logic of Marx’s Capital’, Telos, 27 (1976), p. 111. 3 T. Carver, ‘Marxism as Method’, in T. Ball and J. Farr, After Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 263–4. 4 P. Murray, ‘Marx minus Hegel’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 13 (1983), p. 487. A similar view is taken by M. Desai, ‘Foreword’ to A. Shamsavari, Dialectics and Social Theory: The Logic of Capital, p. ix; D. Little, The Scientific Marx (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 93; also pp. 9, 113, 125, 196; P. Mattick Jr., ‘Marx’s Dialectic’, in F. Moseley, ed., Marx’s Method in Capital, p. 120; also pp. 115–17; E. Roll, A History of Economic Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1962 [1938]), pp. 253, 255; and T. Sowell, ‘Marx’s Capital After One Hundred Years’, in M. C. Howard and J. E. King, eds, The Economics of Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 49–50. 5 Cf. K. Hartmann, ‘Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View’, in Studies in Foundational Philosophy (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1988). 6 K. Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Vol. I (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974 [1867]), pp. 22–9. 7 G. Carchedi, ‘Marx’s Logic of Inquiry and Price Formation’, in Mosely, ed., Marx’s Method in Capital, pp. 195–7. 8 J. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Unwin Books, 1965), pp. 9–10, 22. See also I. Bradley and M. Howard, ‘Introduction’ to Classical and Marxian Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 21, 29; M. Dobb, ‘Classical Political Economy and Karl Marx’, in D. Horowitz, ed., Marx and Modern Economics (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), pp. 58–61; M. Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution Since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 142–3; R. Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), pp. 85–6, 144–5. 9 K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part II (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969), X, A, 2, pp. 164–9. 10 K. Marx,Capital, Vol. 1, p. 26. 11 D. Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, intro. D. Winch (London: Dent, 1984). 12 Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution Since Adam Smith, pp. 66–7. 13 Roll, A History of Economic Thought, p. 175. 14 R. L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Great Economic Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 86, 93.

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15 J. Robinson, Economic Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 39. 16 E. von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System, ed. P. Sweezy (Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus Kelley, 1973 [1896]), pp. 30–1, 35, 68–9, 79, 88–90. 17 Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System, pp. 35, 66, 74, 80. E. Roll also refers to Marx’s use of ‘theorems’, ‘postulates’ and ‘syllogisms’. Cf. History of Economic Thought, p. 296. 18 Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System, pp. 30, 64, 66, 80, 90. 19 R. Hilferding, Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, ed. P. Sweezy (Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus Kelley, 1973 [1904]), pp. 157, 159. 20 Hilferding, Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, pp. 148, 154–7. 21 N. Bukharin, The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (London: Martin Lawrence, 1927 [1919]), pp. 17–18, 23. 22 I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (Detroit: Black & Red Books, 1972 [1928]), pp. 85, 90–1. 23 H. Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Being Also a Theory of Crises (London: Pluto Press, 1992 [1929]), pp. 91–2, 106, 130. 24 K. Korsch, ‘Introduction to Capital’, in Three Essays on Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1971 [1932]), pp. 57–8, 46. 25 P. M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 11. 26 L. Colletti, ‘Dialectical Materialism and Hegel’, in Marxism and Hegel (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 48. 27 L. Colletti, ‘Kant, Hegel and Marx’, in Marxism and Hegel, pp. 121, 126–7. 28 L. Althusser, ‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’, in L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso Books, 1979), pp. 46–7, 50. 29 L. Althusser, ‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’, pp. 50–1; G. Zeleny, The Logic of Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 47. 30 Althusser, ‘The Errors of Classical Economics: an Outline for a Concept of Historical Time’, in Reading Capital, p. 102. See also Althusser, ‘Marx’s Immense Theoretical Revolution’, Reading Capital, p. 187. 31 L. Althusser, ‘The Merits of Classical Economics’, p. 84. 32 L. Althusser, ‘The Errors of Classical Economics’, p. 92. 33 D. Foley, Understanding Capital: Marx’s Economic Theory (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 6. 34 Foley, Understanding Capital: Marx’s Economic Theory, p. 6. 35 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, III, IX, p. 204. 36 K. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, ed. F. Engels, Lawrence & Wishart, 1974 [1894], III, XIII, pp. 212–13, 221. That Marx’s argument is tautological is pointed out by Robinson, An Essay on Marxian Economics, p. 36 and by Roll, History of Economic Thought, p. 297. Both Robinson and Roll consider this to be a weakness and not a strength. See also Little The Scientific Marx, pp. 140–1. 37 Cf. D. McLellan ed., Marx’s Grundrisse (London: Paladin Books, 1973), p. 102. 38 ‘Abstraction a Realist Interpretation’, Radical Philosophy, 28 (1975), p. 15, fn. 21. 39 Sowell, ‘Marx’s Capital After One Hundred Years’, p. 67; Robinson, An Essay on Marxian Economics, p. 13.


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40 A. Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 226, 228. 41 G. Reuten, ‘The Difficult Labour of a Theory of Social Value: Metaphors and Systematic Dialectics at the Beginning of Marx’s Capital’, in Moseley, ed., Marx’s Method in Capital, p. 96. A similar view is taken by B. Ollman, ‘Marxism and Political Science: Prolegomenon to a Debate on Marx’s Method’, Politics and Society (Summer 1973), p. 508, and in his Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 4, 22, 24. Against Reuten and Ollman, a proponent of the non-metaphysical interpretation would simply insist that Marx does provide definitions of all of his key theoretical concepts in Capital. See J. Robinson, An Essay on Marxian Economics (London: Macmillan, 1976), Chapter II, ‘Definitions’; J. Steindl, ‘Marx and the Accumulation of Capital’, pp. 245, 261; R. P. Wolff, Understanding Marx: A Reconstruction and Critique of Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 89–90, 207–21. 42 Little, The Scientific Marx, p. 122. 43 Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, p. 19. 44 Zeleny, The Logic of Marx, p. 52. 45 J. Farr, ‘Marx’s Laws’, Political Studies, XXXIV (1986), p. 214. See also P. Murray, ‘The Necessity of Money: How Hegel Helped Marx Surpass Ricardo’s Theory of Value’, in Moseley, ed., Marx’s Method in Capital, p. 51. 46 Murray, ‘The Necessity of Money’, p. 51. 47 Sayer, ‘Abstraction a Realist Interpretation’, pp. 11, 8; Foley, Understanding Capital, p. 7; and A. Collier, ‘In Defence of Epistemology’, in J. Mepham and D. H. Ruben, eds, Issues in Marxist Philosophy, 3, Epistemology, Science, Ideology (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 81–2. 48 R. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978), p. 214; also pp. 19, 171–5, 199, 211. See also A. Sayer, Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach (London: Hutchinson, 1984), esp. pp. 143–5. 49 Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, p. 174. See also R. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), p. 54; and R. Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (London: Verso Press, 1986), p. 64. 50 It should be noted, as Bhaskar rightly points out, that such statements are not ‘synthetic a priori’ propositions, in the Kantian sense, but rather ‘analytic a posteriori’ propositions. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, p. 64. On this issue, therefore, as on most issues, Marx disagrees with Kant. 51 This is the general tendency of the series entitled Issues in Marxist Philosophy, edited by J. Mepham and D. H. Ruben. See also Farr, ‘Marx’s Laws’, pp. 203–6, 208, 210–11; Farr, ‘Marx No Empiricist’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 13 (1983), pp. 466, 468; R. Keat and J. Urry, Social Theory as Science (London: Routledge, 1975), pp. 2, 68–70, 94–5, 96–118; D. Sayer, Marx’s Method: Ideology, Science and Critique in Capital (Hassocks: Harvester, 1979), pp. 114, 174–5. 52 For the contrary view, see T. Smith, ‘Marx’s Capital and Hegelian Dialectical Logic’; Reuten, ‘The Difficult Labour of a Theory of Social Value’, p. 90; Zeleny, The Logic of Marx, pp. 47–52. 53 A number of commentators have acknowledged that Marx does not reject the principles of traditional logic. See A. Callinicos, Marxism and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 54–5; D. Little, The Scientific Marx, pp. 113, 120; S. Meikle, ‘Dialectical Contradiction and Necessity’, pp. 6, 9, 14; D. H. Ruben, ‘Marxism and Dialectics’, in J. Mepham and D. H. Ruben,

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54 55

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57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68

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Tony Burns eds, Issues in Marxist Philosophy, 1, p. 41; R. Schmitt, ‘The Materialist Dialectic’, Science and Society, 52, 4 (Winter 1988), p. 442; A. Smith, ‘Hegelianism and Marx: A Reply to Lucio Colletti’, Science and Society, 50, 2 (1986), p. 171. L. Wilde, Marx and Contradiction, pp. 102–4; L. Wilde, ‘Logic: Dialectic and Contradiction’, in T. Carver, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 287–91. Marx, Capital, 3, Part III, ‘The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall’, pp. 211–60. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, p. 68. Alternative ‘proofs’ are provided in B. Fine, Marx’s Capital (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 55–6; Fine and Harris, Rereading Capital, p. 61; and J. Roemer, Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 118–19. Little, The Scientific Marx, p. 168; G. McCarthy, Marx’s Critique of Science and Positivism: The Methodological Foundations of Political Economy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), p. 122. J. Steindl, ‘Karl Marx and the Accumulation of Capital’, in Horowitz, ed., Marx and Modern Economics, p. 265. R. Bhaskar, ‘Dialectics’, in T. Bottomore et al., eds, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 125. Ollman, Alienation, p. 178. J. Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy: In Some of Their Historical Relations (London: Allen & Unwin 1967 [1893]), p. 344. T. Smith, ‘Marx’s Capital and Hegelian Dialectical Logic’, in Moseley, ed., Marx’s Method in Capital, p. 25. Arthur, ‘Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital’, p. 67. A similar claim is made by Reuten in his ‘The Difficult Labour of a Social Theory of Value’, pp. 92, 96. J. L. Hanson, A Textbook of Economics (London: Macdonald and Evans, 1972), p. 15. L. Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 78. See B. J. Caldwell, Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the Twentieth Century, revised edition (London: Routledge, 1994 [1982]), p. 133; and M. Hollis and E. J. Nell, ‘Two Economists’, in F. Hahn and M. Hollis, eds, Philosophy and Economic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 47–8, 53. Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, p. 78. Hollis and Nell, ‘Two Economists’, p. 56. Caldwell, Beyond Positivism, p. 104. J. W. Nason, ‘Leibniz and the Logical Argument for Individual Substances’, in R. S. Woolhouse, ed., Leibniz: Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 14, fn. 5. K. Marx, ‘The Metaphysics of Political Economy’, in K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the ‘Philosophy of Poverty’ by M. Proudhon (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973 [1846]), especially s. 1, ‘The Method’, pp. 90–110; K. Marx, ‘Notes on Adolph Wagner’, in Karl Marx: Texts on Method, ed., T. Carver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Marx, ‘The Metaphysics of Political Economy’, pp. 91–2, 94–5. K. Marx, ‘Letter to P. Annenkov, 28 December 1846’, in Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, p. 158.


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72 Marx, ‘Notes on Adolph Wagner’, pp. 198, 201. 73 Marx, ‘Afterword’, p. 27. 74 For example, R. Hudelson, ‘Marx’s Empiricism’, pp. 241, 252. Hudelson claim is considered and rejected by J. Farr, ‘Marx No Empiricist’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 13 (1983), pp. 465–72. See also L. D. Easton, ‘Alienation and Empiricism in Marx’s Thought’, in D. McQuarrie, ed., Marx: Sociology: Social Change: Capitalism (London: Quartet Books, 1978); S. M. Easton, ‘The Marxist versus the Empiricist Theory of Knowledge’, in S. M. Easton, Humanist Marxism and Wittgenstein (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); Little, The Scientific Marx, pp. 119–20, 125–6, 175–6; C. Taylor, ‘Marxism and Empiricism’, in B. Williams, B. and H. Montefiore, eds, British Analytic Philosophy (London, 1966), pp. 227–46. 75 For a good, recent discussion of Marx and positivism see D. Walker, ‘Marx and Scientific Positivism’, Studies in Marxism, 2, 1995. See also J. Farr, ‘Marx and Positivism’, in T. Ball and J. Farr, eds, After Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); J. Farr, ‘Science: Realism, Criticism, History’, in T. Carver, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Marx; and McCarthy, Marx’s Critique of Science and Positivism. 76 Farr, ‘Marx No Empiricist’, pp. 471, 466. 77 Meikle, ‘Dialectical Contradiction and Necessity’, p. 14. Meikle’s own answer to the question is, ‘clearly not’. 78 H. Williams, Hegel, Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic, pp. ix, xii. See also p. 148. 79 Marx, Grundrisse, tr. Nicolaus, p. 151. 80 That Marx does not consider there to be any fundamental conflict between these two approaches, the ‘deductive’ and the ‘dialectical’, is suggested by Maurice Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution Since Adam Smith, p. 143. Although the point is debatable, it could be argued that Marx’s method is ‘dialectical’ in the original sense in which Plato uses this term. See F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 262–9. 81 Williams, Hegel, Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic, p. xii. 82 Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution Since Adam Smith, p. 143. 83 Marx, ‘Afterword’, p. 29. 84 See J. Rees, The Algebra of Revolution, p. 100. 85 Meikle, ‘Dialectical Contradiction and Necessity’, p. 29. 86 Foley, Understanding Capital, p. 10. 87 Mattick, ‘Marx’s Dialectic’, p. 131. 88 J. D. White, ‘Marx: From “The Critique of Political Economy” to Capital’, Studies in Marxism, 1 (1994), p. 103. 89 K. Korsch, ‘Introduction to Capital’, in Three Essays on Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1971 [1932]), pp. 57–8. 90 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. xliv. See also Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital, p. xii. 91 Shamsavari, Dialectics and Social Theory, p. 19. 92 See Roemer, Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory; J. Roemer, ed., Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); T. Carver and P. Thomas, eds, Rational Choice Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1995); M. Roberts, Analytical Marxism: A Critique (London: Verso Books, 1996). 93 See, for example, E. Olin Wright, ‘What is Analytical Marxism?’, in Carver and Thomas, eds, Rational Choice Marxism, pp. 13, 16; Roberts, Analytical Marxism:

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A Critique, p. 15. Other similarities would be the recognition of the validity of formal logical reasoning, an acceptance of the use of ‘models’ in the social sciences, and a recognition of mathematics as a valuable tool, especially in economic research. Cf. Roemer, Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory, pp. 1–6. It should be noted, though, that none of these things is alien to Marx’s own work. A commitment to them is entirely consistent with an ‘orthodox’ or ‘fundamentalist’ interpretation of Marx’s economic theory. It is not at all clear that the same could be said of some of the other features of analytical Marxism, for example, ‘rational choice theory’, ‘game theory’, ‘methodological individualism’, and so on. 94 T. Carver, ‘Marxism as Method’, in Ball and Farr, After Marx, pp. 263–4. Carver has reaffirmed this claim more recently. See the Introduction to T. Carver and P. Thomas, eds, Rational Choice Marxism, pp. 4–5. 95 T. Carver, ‘Marx – and Hegel’s Logic’, Political Studies, XXIV, 1 (1976), p. 68. See also p. 57.

5 From the Critique of Hegel to the Critique of Capital Christopher J. Arthur

The thesis of this essay is that the critique of Hegel cannot be separated from the critique of capital, and that the critique of economic categories is greatly advanced if modelled on the critique of Hegel. It is in truth the very same critique that is to be employed. This identity arises in virtue of the fact that Hegel’s standpoint may be seen as a philosophical absolutisation of the standpoint of capital, 1 on the one hand; and in virtue of the nature of capital on the other; for the form of capital may be understood as homologous with that of Hegel’s ‘Idea’.2 We shall begin by reviewing two opposed interpretations of Hegel; and we shall accept that both have merit, from which we shall conclude that Hegel’s philosophy itself is systematically ambivalent and subject to fatal apories. We shall then turn to the explication of the value-form and argue that ‘the general formula of capital’ may be seen as a ‘Concept’ in Hegel’s sense; and in sinking into production to ground value, capital may be seen as analogous to the Hegelian Idea in its claim to incorporate itself in the real world. Once that has been clarified it will follow that (whether or not Hegel provides a method of general heuristic value) even the most objectionable feature of Hegel’s idealism, its apparent panlogicism, is significant because this false ontology reflects an inverted world in which the value abstraction claims priority over its material bearers and the ideal logic of capital imposes itself on human beings.

The Question of Hegel In the Marxist appropriation of Hegel there are two opposed positions. First there is that expressed by Marx in 1857 when he complained that ‘Hegel succumbed to the illusion of conceiving the real as the result of the self-movement of thought collecting itself, deepening itself, and 105

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unfolding itself out of itself.’3 This may lead one therefore to interpret Marx’s acknowledged debt to Hegel as his separating out a dialectic from the idealist ontology, as Marx seems to say in his Afterword to Capital. The other position is a contemporary reading that defends Hegel against Marx and attempts to rehabilitate Hegel’s method while relegating his mistakes to his substantive social analysis (on this reading the true Hegelian would be a communist): in reality, it is Marx who suffers from illusion; there is no metaphysical idealism in Hegel, and the method is thus in no need of rescuing from such mysticism. Howard Williams’ reading of Hegel is a strong version of the first position. He holds that Hegel’s Logic is a ‘deduction of reality’; this means that concepts ‘wholly constitute the world’ and any ‘empirical foundation to our experience’ is spirited away.4 He cites approvingly Marx’s complaint quoted above that Hegel conceived the real as the product of thought.5 The second position is defended most articulately by Tony Smith.6 In his work he defends Hegel from the first sort of reading, a reading to which Marx was ‘inclined’, he concedes. In support of a contrary view of Hegel he provides evidence that Hegel ‘does not reduce the world to logical necessity’ alone.7 Faced with passages that seem to refer to a self-creative super-subject, Smith suggests such passages are merely ‘picture thoughts’ designed to ease a Christian audience into the system. He dissents therefore from Marx’s opinion just quoted.8 Smith finds that what is there in Hegel is a reconstruction of the logic of reality through the exposition of a categorial system. The goal is to present a systematic ordering of all the cognitive frameworks that can be used to comprehend reality; this is simultaneously a systematic account of reality itself ordered according to what aspects of reality fit within each cognitive framework. Smith then argues that such a reconstructive method is that systematically adopted by Marx in his Capital. It is unified through a systematic progression of socio-economic categories reconstructing the capitalist mode of production in thought, beginning with the simplest abstract category and dialectically advancing to the concrete whole. So from this review of the argument over Hegel we find that, on the one hand, he is seen as simply recognising the complex forms of reality and providing a method for systematising the categories we need to appropriate it in thought; while, on the other hand, he is seen as an arch-metaphysician, a pan-logicist who holds that reality is nothing but the embodiment of the self-constituted Idea, such that the categories evolved by the ideal movement posit the forms of reality, and their dialectic is its unifying principle.

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In my view both readings of Hegel outlined above are justifiable in the sense that they have support in the texts; but, since I want to argue that what seems irrational and mystical in Hegel is significant, something more needs to be said about this aspect of Hegelianism and its relation to capital. Marx spoke of a ‘rational kernel’ in Hegel’s dialectic – which ‘is standing on its head’9 – to be extracted once Hegel is put ‘back on his feet’, so that we can reach some common-sense materialist dialectic. 10 However, what if the secret meaning of Hegel’s dialectic derives from an ‘inverted world’ of capital’s own making? After all Marx referred in all seriousness to the commodity as abounding in metaphysical subtleties (in the section on ‘the fetishism of the commodity’). On my reading this is to be taken literally. When Marx characterised Hegel’s Idea as the demiurge of reality he meant that as an objection;11 but what if it provides the guideline to a reading of capital that uncovers the ‘metaphysics’ of the value-form? Indeed, the very characterisation Marx gives of Hegel’s Idea in the above-quoted passage from the 1857 Introduction is precisely how I want to characterise capital: the result of the self-movement of the form produced through the activity of exchange, namely the value-form, crystallising itself, deepening itself and unfolding itself out of itself. I think both Marx’s idealist reading and Tony Smith’s non-metaphysical one are right there in Hegel. When a truly great thinker gets so muddled as to give warrant to apparently contradictory readings, this has to be explained from the social unconsciousness of the epoch. I believe – on the basis of what follows – that Hegel was afflicted with the ‘double vision’ occasioned by the form of capital as self-valorising value: on the one hand, there is the fetishisation of capital as inherently productive of itself, and, on the other hand, its powerlessness to do other than to recognise and exploit the productiveness of labour. In spite of his great logical insights Hegel’s philosophy was still trapped within its bourgeois horizon and the distorted vision of the world to which this gave rise. However, even those who read Hegel in a wholly favourable way may still be convinced by my exposition that capital has an aporetic character similar to that to which I pointed when – rightly or wrongly – I attributed the contradictory readings of Hegel’s philosophy to the problematic relationship of Hegel’s Idea to reality. Hegel’s logic treated the fundamental categories of thought as pure categories independent of any contingent empirical instantiation. He presented them as systematically ordered, from simple abstract ones to more complex, and hence more concrete, ones. This system of categories was said to be ‘self-moving’ in that one category necessarily gives rise to another contrary, or more comprehensive, one, until the most

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comprehensive is reached – the Absolute Idea. Hegel was an absolute idealist in so far as he seems to think that he has thereby shown the necessity of such relationships arising and developing in the real world. Moreover, he protested against the definition of the Absolute as ‘the unity of the finite and the infinite, of thinking and being etc.’, because in this formula ‘the infinite only appears to be neutralised with the finite, just as the subjective is neutralised with the objective, and thinking with being’. His Absolute Idea is ‘absolute negativity’ and in it ‘the infinite overgrasps the finite, thinking overgrasps being, subjectivity overgrasps objectivity.’12 (‘Overgrasp’ is not an English word and is an attempt by the translation to render literally übergreifen; other possibilities would be ‘overreach,’ ‘overlap’ or ‘override’.) I shall argue that the key thing about the bourgeois epoch is that real abstraction is present in exchange of commodities, and that on this basis there develops a form, namely capital, which (like Hegel’s Idea) is immanent in the phenomena and has effectivity in its objectification in them. Therewith we have a logic of inversion and reification. For ‘the enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvey, world’13 Marx spoke of is that of capital itself. (It is interesting that the German expression here translated ‘topsy-turvey’ is ‘auf den Kopf ’ – ‘on its head’ – the same expression Marx used in the Afterword to Capital in characterising Hegel’s philosophy.) The system of capitalist production and reproduction is directed by the immanent law of development of capital: it is not a question of capital being in the hands of the capitalists and subject to their decisions, for these are constrained by the logic of the form itself. Marx went out of his way to stress this point: a capitalist, he said, was to be treated simply as ‘capital personified’ while the ‘overriding subject’ (übergreifende Subjekt – the same term we have just seen Hegel using) of the process was capital itself. 14 In the next section I develop the background to this notion in the idea of a real abstraction lying at the basis of the bourgeois epoch, and in the idea that capital is an ‘inverted world’.15

The Exchange Abstraction In so far as traditional accounts of Marx’s Capital are concerned, the only significant use of the term abstraction has been that associated with the distinction Marx draws between concrete and abstract labour, together with his identification of the latter as substance of value. However, two things have generally been overlooked: that the meaning of abstraction here requires as a consequence a recognition that thereby an


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inverted world is constituted; and that the same distinction and the same inversion arise prior to any discussion of the substance of value, being implicit in the value-form itself. Let us explain. Commodities are brought to market because they are believed to be use-values required by others, and if and when they are eventually consumed this actualises their original positing as use-values. But along the way they are in a different phase of being; for while they are being exchanged they are not being used; and furthermore the ratio of exchange has no evident determinant in their use-value as such. In the main the commodities exchanged are incommensurable as use-values because their particular qualities are adapted to different uses. What happens in the formation of exchange-value is an abstraction from such specificity, and the negation of this difference of use-value. What is of great interest here is that this abstraction is not primarily a mental operation; it is a material abstraction. It is implicit in this purely material process of abstraction that it is not necessary for the parties to the exchange to understand the logical form of their practical activity. As a consequence of this material abstraction from the specificity of the use-values concerned, which is ‘suspended’ for the period of exchange, the commodities acquire as a new determination the character of exchange-values, and the particulars concerned play the role of bearers of this determination imposed on them while passing through this phase of their life-cycle. They become subject to the value-form. Money evolves to serve as their universal equivalent; granted by social practice the role of intermediary it achieves the equation of all commodities as abstractly identical, being itself thereby abstraction in motion. Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first to insist on setting aside the issue of abstract labour so as to leave in clear view the study of abstraction in the value-form itself. He made the important preliminary point that it is not what people think that matters. It is how they act that is of primary importance in sustaining the relationships that constitute a particular mode of ‘social synthesis’. This epoch is characterised by a most peculiar social synthesis in that it is predicated on an essentially abstract form of relationship equating commodities as values. The key point is that ‘abstraction’ is not exclusively the activity of thought but arises in commodity exchange, in practice. 16 Accordingly Sohn-Rethel analysed the form of value as such which springs from exchange as such, bracketing any labour content (an exercise in social phenomenology perhaps): The chief difference distinguishing the Marxian treatment of economics from the bourgeois one lies in the importance accorded to

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the formal aspects of economic reality. The understanding of form as attached to being and not only to thinking was the main principle of dialectics which Marx drew from Hegel.17 Theoretical priority must be accorded to ‘form analysis’, he argued, even though ‘the abstractness of value always transfers itself to labour’ and finds its real meaning there, because it is the form of exchange that establishes the necessary social synthesis in the first place before labours expended may be commensurated in it.18 The value-form consequently constitutes a form of social unity; in it the commodity is determined as a value, a value as such, not merely something valuable to you or to me. The value-form of the commodity rests on a split between value as the identity of commodities, premised on an abstract universal posited through equivalent exchange, and their enduring particularity, differentiating them from each other as use-values; moreover this doubling is a relation in which the form, the abstract universal, dominates the matter, the various use-values. The development of the value-form exhibits the categorial dialectic in which this basic contradiction gains ‘room to move’.19 The material abstraction implicit in exchange produces an ‘inverted reality’ in which commodities simply instantiate their abstract essence as values. The very structure of the value-form is a manifestation of the fact that capital is a realm of estrangement in so far as exchange-value dominates use-value. This identification of commodities as ‘values’ requires a rigorous abstraction from their natural properties, and sets the natural body of the commodity as the mere ‘envelope’ of the said value, a clear case of the inversion of universal and particular. In the first edition of Capital there is an Appendix on the value-form in which Marx points to the inversion consequent on the abstraction peculiar to the value-form, such that value itself exists as a hypostatised abstraction: Within the value-relation and the value-expression included in it, the abstractly general counts not as a property of the concrete, sensibly real, but on the contrary the sensibly concrete counts as the mere form of appearance or definite form of realisation of the abstractly general . . . This inversion . . . characterises the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say: Law, this abstraction, realises itself in Roman Law and in German Law, in these concrete laws, this interconnection becomes mystical. 20


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What is at issue in the value-form abstraction is by no means the same sort of abstraction as natural science employs when it studies mass, for example, and treats bodies under this description regardless of their other properties. For mass is indeed a given property of the bodies concerned, inhering in each. But, as Marx says, value has ‘a purely social reality’, not ‘an atom of matter’ enters into it. 21 Whereas in the mass case ‘the principle of abstraction’ may quite properly be used to say two bodies, balancing each other on a scale, share the same mass, in the case of value this principle operates in reverse so to speak: because we equate the commodities as values we in practice impute to them the same value as if value were a property inherent in them. The fetishism so posited is an objective phenomenon, not a confusion of social consciousness. The secret of the structure and development of the capitalist economy, then, is to be found right at the start when the material abstraction of commodity exchange creates the reality of pure forms, which then embark on their own logic of development. I stress that the thesis of this essay is that the objective movement of exchange, and Hegel’s idealist philosophy, are the only two cases known to me where abstraction either is, or is supposed to be, objective, where abstractions embark on their own logic of development and realise themselves. All other abstraction is merely a mental process, whether the abstraction is understood to yield nominalist or real universals. Just as Hegel’s logic follows the self-movement of thought (‘thinking itself, devoid of personality, [is] the productive subject’22) as it reconstructs the categorial universe, so we can follow the self-movement of capital as a ‘productive subject devoid of personality’. (The capitalist, according to Marx, is the personification of capital; but if, because of personal quirks, he acts contrary to the spirit of capitalism he soon ceases to be a capitalist.) The dialectic of exchange sets up a form-determined system in which the forms are indeed ‘self-acting’; not just in the sense of being categorially connected by our thought process. Hence it is possible to demonstrate in a systematic development the logic of such form-determination. In so far as the real is self-reproducing, it should be possible to show how this is achieved through certain inner necessities of its structure; in other words, how the logic of the system tendentially ensures its reproduction. Such a systematic presentation of the logic of the value-form concludes with capitalist production through a process of specifying at each level a more adequate shape of existence of the abstract indeterminateness of the origin. It will be demonstrated that in the dialectical development of forms springing from commodity exchange, the value

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abstractly implicit in the commodity becomes explicit in money, becomes its own end in the formula of capital, and imposes itself on nature and labour in industry, really subordinating all its conditions of existence to its one-dimensional telos of accumulation. It is my view that only after developing the forms of exchange up to the circuit of capital can one give grounds for picking out as systematically important those commodities which are products.23 Generalised commodity exchange is thereby grounded in generalised commodity production.24 Because of its importance in shaping the character and direction of social material production, the value-form (as the germ of capital) should be analysed first, ‘bracketing’ entirely the origin of the objects of exchange, and the transition made to production in accordance with the determinations immanently required for the reproduction of capital according to the necessity of its concept. The next section depicts the dialectic of these categories.

The Dialectic of the Value-form This presentation presupposes at the outset that generalised commodity exchange is the primary mode of synthesis of the social division of labour in the bourgeois epoch. It covers three successive domains analogous with those of Hegel’s Logic (compare The Encyclopaedia Logic, §83): • commodity exchange in its immediacy – value implicit in commodities; • the mediation of exchange in money – the reflection and showing forth of value; • exchange in its unity with itself (metamorphoses of circulation) – value in and for itself as capital. (Categories from Hegel’s logic are in bold on their introduction in the following detailed outline.25) Goods appear as beings in the circuits of exchange, and pass into nothingness as they disappear from it, perhaps to be consumed. Their being, made determinate and fixed in this sphere (as ‘Dasein’), is that of exchangeable commodities; i.e. commodities become distinguished from being goods in general by the quality of being exchangeable. The quality of exchangeability requires further determination. It is not enough that goods be specified as having characteristics that make them exchangeable in a general indeterminate sense; for exchanges really to occur a commodity must be definable as a separate item


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(a ‘being-for-self’ in Hegel’s jargon). When a bakery sells you ‘bread’ it in fact sells you so many loaves of such and such weight. A commodity has to be able to specify itself as an instantiation in delimited form of the good concerned. Through this notion of limit we make the transition to the category of quantity. The one commodity is presented for exchange as at the same time many, yet in these one and the same. This abstract identity necessarily posited in the offer for exchange of a quantity of the commodity in question reflects itself in the body of the good concerned. Every ‘bag of apples’ in the supermarket is supposed to be the same as all the others (but let the buyer beware!). 26 Since the quantum, the unit of exchange, cannot appear as a unit of any magnitude common to the natural bodies of the heterogeneous commodities exchanging, it may be expressed as a pure number. (‘I’ll give you six of these for four of those.’) But the quantitative ratio practically uniting commodities in the bargain actualises their common character as exchangeables, as drawing other commodities in exchange for themselves. Every ratio of exchange is thus implicitly a measure of their value in exchange. To sum up: goods entering the circuits of exchange become determined as commodities; their quality as exchangeables requires a complementary quantitative dimension if bargains are to be struck; the ratios of such quantities given in exchange appear as measures of exchange-value. But if a genuine ‘measurable’ is to be posited it must exist in a form that is absolutely indifferent to the way it is measured, to all the specific exchange values. It must be exchangeability per se. This means that, underlying the relation of commodities to one another, there is a common essence, a value in itself distinct from any particular relations that might be established between a commodity and others. Such a move to an ‘intrinsic value’ is in no way a ‘proof’ of value, as perhaps one reading of Marx’s first section would hold. Rather it poses the problem of further grounding such a postulate. If different commodities are identical as exchange-values, this requires a ground for its meaningfulness. If such an underlying value exists, then we can speak of the commodities themselves as ‘values’ as if a value were a thing, constituted by a persisting material that assumes the shape now of corn and now of iron indifferently. But if there is such a content hidden away behind the form of exchange, it must prove itself in gaining appropriate lawlike expression in the phenomenal world. Such a posited essence must gain ground in more developed form. This is what makes money necessary we shall see.

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The identity of commodities as values is not written on their foreheads, Marx observed in his discussion of the forms of value. It is true that the simple exchange relation posits the equivalent as the bearer of the value of that in the relative expression, but since the reversed relation is just as possible this suggests value is an empty abstraction. In the expanded form of value the very multiplicity of value expressions irresistibly suggests there is an identical content, but only when in the general equivalent form all commodities are unified in the same measure can we speak of a form of value that gives a consistent articulation of the relationship between value as an inner content and value in its outer manifestation. An interesting reversal now takes place in that it seemed originally that the power of exchange possessed by every commodity expressed itself in its positing the equivalent as its value material; but as a consequence of the development of a general equivalent it is the latter that gains the power of immediate exchangeability in so far as all other commodities value themselves in it. It seems now that the other commodities have value only when they have it reflected in them through their recognition by the general equivalent, which solicits them to solicit it. In this correlation of forces value measures itself against itself. While a purely formal possibility of considering one commodity as a general equivalent would be enough for the function of ideal measure of value, value can gain actuality only when such a universal equivalent socially exists as a single reality, i.e. with money. In money, as distinct from commodities, value gains real substantiality and money can function as means of payment, medium of exchange, and store of value. 27 (In the case of coined money value is indeed ‘written on its forehead’.) It is perfectly useless to discuss which is cause and which effect, whether commodity value produces money as its visible form, or whether only money produces the value dimension as a virtual reality in the first place. The dialectical view to take is that each is mediated in the other. For value to be developed requires this doubling and the reciprocal action of money and commodities. But in such a doubling of the value-form there is still an unmediated unity of immediacy and mediation, i.e. of commodities and money. Universality (the money form of value) and particularity (commodities) have here fallen apart. True they are related: each gains sense only in relation to the other. But, if value is to be coherent, it must supersede this doubling of its determinations into separable, if related, manifestations. Its unitary individuality, i.e. its true concept, is constituted just in so far as it posits itself as being both, but neither, commodities or money; it is in fact nothing but the relatedness of which we have been


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speaking; the price form posits it in the form of the judgment: ‘What does this bushel of corn cost? Two pounds’ (or ‘How much corn can I buy with two pounds ? One bushel’). Value is neither particular (the corn) nor universal (the coin) but the combination of the two definitions in a single conclusion (Schluss) through the comprehension of these moments as a totality. But this conceptual unity is purely subjective, purely formal. We think it when we understand what a price list is, i.e. when we grasp the unity of the two sides. The next step is to elucidate the conditions for this concept of value to be objectively determining of itself. This begins with the concluding of bargains, the closing of sales. (Interestingly Schluss, the term employed in Hegel’s logic for inference or syllogism, is the same as that used in market exchange for closing a sales, just as in English an argument is conclusive and a bargain is concluded.) It is completed in what Marx accomplishes in the section on the metamorphoses of commodity circulation. In the price-form the particular and universal determinations of value are distributed between the commodity and money; and their identity is merely formal. But in the metamorphoses of commodities both determinations get expressed as moments of a whole in so far as the contradiction between the forms of appearance of value (commodities and money) is brought into motion and their unity established in the fluidity of circulation whereby each passes over into the other; the self-same value, doubled into different shapes of existence, appears now as commodity, now as money, now yet again as commodity. But the circulation of commodities, conceptualised as C-M-C’, has no necessity, because the motivation for it is external to the process itself, in that the ends of the chain pass out of circulation. Hence the renewal of circulation depends on the continuance of demand and of supply. The interesting point about the possibility of a temporary hiatus in circulation is that the determination of money as a store of value now emerges; with money in hand the possibility of renewing the circuit when required, or when conditions are favourable, is present. Starting from money gives rise to the movement M-C-M, and therewith a systematic advance is made possible in the interweaving of money and commodities, namely that the M-C-M circuit has built into it greater possibilities of continuity and self-reproduction than the C-M-C’ circuit. Value is now immanent in the activity of exchange; it is itself the object, not the effect and medium of other motives. With the form of capital, value becomes its own end rather than mediator of other relations; that is to say that with capital we have before us an individual ‘subject’. 28

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The self-development of such a ‘subject’ can consist only in its selfvalorisation. Its circuit must take the form: M-C-M+m: or, for short, M-C-M’. (The full argument for this is to be found in the next section.) The Idea of capital is the unity of the objective circulation of commodities and money with the inner (subjective) universalising drive of limitless expansion. It may be doubted whether the mere form of self-valorising value would be enough to pass from a possibility of accumulation to a drive for accumulation. But capital has already answered this question in so far as it appears as many capitals thus enforcing through external competition the immanent tendency. Just as with life itself, the squeezing out of individual capitals in the ruthless struggle to survive only signals the greater permanence of capital in general perfecting itself through the survival of the fittest. The question to be faced now is whether the Idea of capital as self-valorising value can make itself Absolute, i.e. truly self-determining.

The Idea of Capital In truth the concept of capital so far developed is very far from exhibiting the form of self-determination; indeed even its ‘Being-for-Self’ is not yet guaranteed. In Hegel’s logic, in spite of its location in the first part, the Doctrine of Being, this category is of central importance because reference to self is the basic logical structure that allows a truly immanent dialectic to proceed within a totality. Let us then review Hegel’s development of this category. He introduces first the incontestable notion that ‘something only is what it is within its limit and by virtue of its limit’, that there is always ‘something else’ beyond the limit which defines it, and that ‘everything finite is subject to alteration’ as it surpasses its previous limit: ‘Something becomes an other, but the other is itself a something, so it likewise becomes an other and so on ad infinitum.’ This endless iteration Hegel calls the ‘spurious infinite’ which is superseded when something and other are grasped as phases of the same thing ‘and this relation to itself in the other is genuine infinity’, he says. 29 Therewith the category of ‘Being-for-Self’ emerges. Now it is obvious that in the M-C-M movement there is precisely such reference to self in the reflux of money. But the only meaning this has is if it results in an increment of value. For if capital is to actualise its ‘Being-for-Self’ here, then, in furthering itself through its moments, it must become different from itself in its own otherness as well as identifying itself in it. Alteration is the superseding of limit, which here must mean a limited amount, because in the case of money as a pure


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quantity the only possible difference between two instantiations of this universal is in amount. Thus simply to be itself capital must become ever larger. But the forms of value thus far developed rest on the presupposition of equivalence relations; not only is there no reason why such a difference of amount should emerge, it even seems logically excluded. (Note that since we have as yet been studying only the form of this equivalence we have not as yet grounded this in any determination of magnitude, and in particular we have not yet touched on labour-times. If such a determinant cannot be found, then the whole system becomes radically contingent. But for now we are accepting the presupposition that exchange is of equivalents and following through the logic of such a form.) Thus the general formula of capital does not as its stands fully conceptualise capital if under the rule of equivalence the second money phase should be identical with the first in every respect. Empirically there would be no reason to engage in such a practice of exchange and conceptually the claim that capital represents a new form of value is undermined. The cycle is not an articulated ground for its comprehensive self-positing. The sequence C-M-C’ exhibits difference but in so far as C is grounded in production and C’ in consumption the ends of the chain pass out of circulation and it lacks the reference to self in its differences that would make a totality of its determinations, a real individual. With M-C-M there is the opposite problem; there is no difference at all between the end and the beginning. For capital to emerge as a selfgrounded form of value both the reference to self and the difference from itself must be united. Its circuit must be M-C-M+m. The one-dimensional logic of the forms of value, cannot account for this; it therefore runs out of steam. It becomes necessary then to look outside it to solve the contradiction between the principle of identity and non-identity; we must look to the real content regulated by the forms to see if the solution to the contradiction may be found there. Thus far the material content of the commodity has been treated as a mere bearer of the form; and the latter has thus far been developed in indifference to the specificity of its material support (albeit that the material of every commodity has a specific usefulness, and that commodity selected as money must have the material properties required for this use e.g. imperishability). The logic of the value-form, developed from the commodity-form to the moneyform to the capital-form, was premised on the absolute negativity of the movement of exchange in so far as all difference of use-value that gave

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sense to this was neglected, i.e. ‘negated’, in the interests of following through the logic of identity arising from the common character of commodities as exchangeables. The unmediated opposition between usevalue and exchange-value is characteristic of the logic of the value-form in its purity. Use-value has to be presupposed, but is at the same time set aside as a ‘natural’ phenomenon to be contrasted with the social determination of the economy in so far as it is understood as the simple circulation of commodities and money. In the general formula of capital this immediate opposition is retained even in the mediating activity of capital itself as it unifies the moments of its circuit in its movement through them; for use-values are still treated as mere bearers or supports of the form. Now we reach a crucial turning point which requires the exposition to take notice of the sphere of use-values, for all exchange in its logic yet rests on a use-value sphere. Indeed, only in this sphere can capital make its Idea of itself an actual power in the world. In Hegel’s philosophy the pure forms of conceptuality become Absolute Idea in so far as they are understood as at the same time the shape of the world; thus Hegel’s philosophy turns from Logic to the external sphere of Nature (which has space and time as its initial categories) and then to the explicit unity of subjectivity and objectivity in Spirit developing itself in world history. Indeed, strictly speaking, the ‘Idea’ is not part of the Logic for it is present only when the ‘Concept’ is united with the real material of the world so as to ‘fill out’, as it were, the pure forms of thought. From the point of view of reality in its comprehensive articulation the categorial system of the Logic, in spite of its inner complexity, is as a whole a simple immediacy. As Hegel puts it in his Science of Logic, logic ‘in the absolute Idea, has withdrawn into that same simple unity which its beginning is, the pure immediacy of being in which . . . every determination . . . is removed by abstraction’.30 The Idea then mediates itself through determining itself to concrete difference in Nature and back to its unity in difference with itself in Spirit. These three spheres (Logic, Nature and Spirit) are each totalities, each comprehending a moment of the Absolute. To make a transition from one to another in the exposition of the Absolute is therefore not to find a higher category of the sphere we are in, but to make a new start as it were. Thus there is a transition from the whole Logic to the whole that is Nature, and the initial categories of Nature are not only not logical categories but are equally as primitive as the initial categories of the Logic. The exact relation between logical principles and the natural shapes is a matter of controversy but there is no doubt that Hegel saw


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Nature, being the sphere of the Idea in immediacy, finitude and otherness, as ‘having its truth outside itself’. Logic is given the power to ‘overgrasp’ Nature, as was noted earlier. How does this movement between the spheres inform our account? It requires the logic of the value-form in its purity to be redrawn as a abstract immediacy negatively related to the material content of the value-form. Going over to the study of use-value as a spatio-temporal sphere is then the necessary next move of the dialectic of capital and we will be looking at the difference such externality makes to the concept of capital. Very roughly, capital may be shown to sink into the sphere of use-value in three stages; these are merchant capital (the immediate concretisation of the general identity of capital with itself), the formal subsumption of production by capital (the moment of capital’s difference from itself in relation to itself) and the real subsumption of production by capital (the unity of capital with itself informing both production and circulation). In fact, the only categories from Hegel’s philosophy of nature that we take are space and time. The parallel is therefore merely at the general level: logic is related to nature as the form of value is related to the realm of the natural body of commodities and their location and origin in space and time. It remains to be seen how capital ‘overgrasps’ them. In this dialectic the first phase is to consider the immediate being of the general formula of capital in exteriority. What is the difference this introduces to the concept? To begin with, space makes a difference for the rate of exchange at one place may be different from that at another place. This is how merchant capital makes its appearance, gaining a profit on arbitrage, a more or less exact concretisation of the general formula M-C-M’ but including implicitly the notion that the sellers and buyers of the commodities are distantiated spatially. Time makes a difference because what may be bought cheaply at one time may be sold for more later. Here the merchant functions as a speculator. At this level also may be mentioned money-lending capital, for what may not be saleable at one time may be so later when purchasers acquire the necessary funds: here money-lending overcomes temporal distantiation through loans to purchasers redeemable at a later date at a premium; in effect, the commodity is again sold at one price and bought at another. 31 It is important to notice that both these forms of capital rely on an already given set of marketable commodities and the possibility of a surplus is contingent. Only with industrial capital does the commodity

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brought to market originate from capital’s own circuit (M-C . . . P . . .C’-M’) when it buys means of production and labour power (C) and sets them to work to produce (P) a new commodity (C’) which it hopes to market profitably. It is the difference introduced at the material level (surplus product) that ensures the process of production is simultaneously a valorisation process generating surplus-value, thereby resolving the contradiction in the general formula. Thus, if capital as self-valorising value is to realise itself, the movement of value must appear ‘in a much more complex form’ than in pure circulation; it must be ‘the movement which simultaneously creates, produces, exchange values as its own premiss’. The phenomenon of circulation may now be viewed in a new light; as an immediacy it is ‘pure semblance’; but as grounded in production it is the necessary from of appearance of capitalist relations of production. 32 Now formal logic faced with the variety of ways in which the general formula of capital (advance of money so as to make money) may be instantiated would simply treat them as species of the generic form. Dialectical logic however asks, what is the proper content of the form? What gives the form its self-subsistence? I believe it is instructive here to return again to analogous cases in philosophy, and to a comparison of Spinoza’s absolute with Hegel’s absolute. Spinoza’s absolute is ‘substance’, the one infinite reality of which everything else is an attribute or mode determined as a negation of it. Hegel, notwithstanding his admiration of Spinoza’s ruthless negating of everything finite, complained that Spinoza’s substance is not truly absolute, for all difference is swallowed up therein, whereas his own Absolute Idea includes an account of real external difference as emerging through its proper activity. Consider this passage from Hegel’s lectures: Spinoza places substance [cf. merchant capital] at the head of his system and defines it as the unity of thinking [cf. value] and extension [cf. the sphere of use value], without demonstrating how he arrives at this distinction and how he succeeds in tracing it back to the unity of substance. The defect of Spinoza’s philosophy consists in the fact that the form [cf. the value-form] is not known to be immanent to the content [cf. products], and for that reason it supervenes upon it only as an external, subjective form. Substance [cf. merchant capital] is only the abyss in which all determinate content [cf. tradable commodities] is swallowed up . . . and which produces nothing out of itself that has a positive substance of its own. 33


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Most importantly, in Hegel’s view Spinoza’s philosophy lacks ‘the principle of individuality’. In contrast to this, Hegel’s Idea does so claim not merely to register in its own categories the material given to it, but to produce such a content out of its own proper activity and that this content be credited with its individual substance. This excursion clarifies the inadequate logic of merchant capital; it embodies in the real world of exchange the general formula of capital in so far as value transforms itself through its different instantiations to emerge as greater than it began; thus it is, it appears, a self-reproducing substance; but in a manner parallel to Hegel’s critique of Spinoza we can say it only subsumes the different commodities it buys and sells within its own determinations, it is not bringing them forth from itself as its determinations. It cannot legitimately declare the commodities it trades in are nothing but its own forms of development because its content is not brought forth from itself. Industrial capital is hence a more authentic realisation of what I call the Idea of capital just in so far as it has reason so to claim genuine unity of form and content in the reality of its production and circulation processes.34 In fact the empty ‘formula’ of capital must be actualised in the whole round of production, circulation and consumption. Capital gains actuality only as industrial capital, not as merchant or money-lending capital. The latter lack a proper content. The content traded in by merchant capital counts for it only as realisable value whereas industrial capital is determined not as formally reducing a given content to itself as does merchant capital, but as having its own proper content in the individuality of its product which indeed ‘has a positive substance of its own’ so to speak, and requires industrial capital to invest itself in a particular field of production. A merchant can set up as a ‘general dealer’; his stock is an unmediated unity of substance (its value) and accident (the ‘list’); 35 but there is no such thing as a ‘general producer’; production is necessarily the production of individual products by individual enterprises. Industrial capital thereby unites infinite form and the realm of finitude. Earlier we saw Hegel attack a view of the Absolute as neutralising infinity with finitude. So here this unity of industrial capital may yet comprise a neutral balance of circulation and production if the latter is merely formally subsumed under capital while retaining its own rhythms.36 If capital is to ‘overgrasp’ this alien sphere, the real subordination of production to the dictates of valorisation must result in a thoroughly reorganised structure of industry, of labour and machinery. In sum, a focus on production as the prime site of economically significant relationships is justified because the most glaring insufficiency of

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the formulaic definition of capital as self-valorising value is that the bearers of value, namely the commodities as use-values, are necessary for capital to feed off but only contingently available to it. Thus to gain control of its conditions of existence, to ‘posit’ its presuppositions, capital must take charge of the production of these commodities. Productive activity must then be form-determined by capital. Capital must make that activity its own activity, determining the motive and dynamic of production. But this is no easy task. When it sinks into production, capital, attempting to ground its form on its own action, tries to shape this matter (originally excluded from the value-form through the exchange abstraction) into a content, but then, rather than dealing with things without a will of their own, it finds itself faced with another subject, namely the proletariat, which struggles against capital’s positing of its labour as capital’s own activity. When we pass to the appropriation of natural resources we see that, because of its very form, capital is unable to work with Nature but despoils it and thus undercuts the very basis of all production – the ultimate ‘condition of existence’ not only of capital but of life itself. This is because the value-form determinations do not represent or mediate the free self-development of the matter’s own form (still less the free self-development of the human potential of the worker) but the imposition of a set of alien determinations. Capital tries to subordinate its conditions of existence to its own aims, but there is always something ‘in excess of its concept’ (to speak Adornoese) or an independent reality, an irredeemably ‘other’. There is what I call its internal other (the proletariat produced by capital itself as its negation) and what I call its external other (Nature despoiled and exhausted by capital). These are others in the sense that they are recalcitrant to capital’s appropriation of them; thus they set limits to capital’s development, and in the case of the proletariat it may become the counter-subject that negates capital. So, in the case of the proletariat, capital must not merely appropriate its other, as with Nature, but actively negate its negation continually because the proletariat is potentially a force in its own right.37 Thus the capital relation exists only through a dialectic of negativity, continually generating a proletariat, but continually imprisoning it within its own forms, reifying its activity, expropriating its product, and colonising its consciousness so that it cannot think other than as bearer of capital, as its agent. Of course, just as capital needs its ‘personifications’, it needs its agents, including labour above all. So capital must employ people and machinery; but just as its engineers advise it about the right sort of materials, it manages its hired


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hands as advised by human resource teams and industrial relations people who know all about the right colour to paint factory walls. However, it should not be thought that, if capital has to win its way through ‘otherness’, this marks a difference in the parallelism with Hegel’s Idea that I have been expounding; for in Hegel’s philosophy too the Absolute is only such in its return to itself from otherness, but it cannot avoid ‘the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative’; it must alienate itself and yet find itself still in its other. 38 Capital is definable as self-valorising value. But of what does it create value? And how is its magnitude determined? Every capital demands a recompense for the time in which it is tied up in production and circulation. But of all the times capital is tied up only one creates a positive – the time spent exploiting labour. I say this because the proto-subject capital faces in the proletariat a major obstacle to making of itself the absolute reality, for, as we saw above, capital must continually negate this its negation; success in this endeavour is indeed a most significant positive achievement well worth its own category, value (and surplus-value). (The other fractions of capital are parasitic on this achievement of industrial capital.) So class struggle is constitutive of the central categories of capital in so far as it rests on the ‘pumping out’ of labour from the worker. But this is not the view of capital itself which can only admit labour acts as its agent when it sets the whole elaborate factory organisation in motion under the constraints of its law of value and for the purpose of valorisation. (The puzzle this creates for capitalist apologetic was expressed in the nineteenth century by an anonymous pamphleteer: ‘Though we generally look on production as effected by capital, that being the prime mover, labour, of course, is the immediate agent’ 39 – an obviously aporetic formula.) As we have seen, the possibility of this constitution of capital as an autonomous subject arises from the development of the value-form. The commodity form of the product embodies an abstraction from the natural heterogeneity of goods, namely value. Commodity production embodies in its processes a self-moving abstraction, namely capital.40 In so far as it controls production and successfully reifies labour, making of it a mere agent no different from machinery, the Idea of Capital epochally achieves self-determination.

Aporia in Hegel and in Capital It is necessary now to draw the consequences of the parallelism between the structure of Hegel’s philosophy and that of capital.41 Our thesis is

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that the critique of economic categories is that of the social forms that Hegel’s concepts absolutise and idealise. In these forms an autonomous ‘logic’ of development is indeed present; but it is immanent in the rule of capital because this social form is uniquely constituted through ontological inversion in a way that grounds an idealist dialectic. Developed capitalist society is an appropriate object of critique because there the social synthesis is constituted through a totalising abstraction – namely value. So-called ‘postmodernists’ deny the validity of the category of totality, as if Hegel and Marx were at fault for using it in their account of the bourgeois epoch, whereas they reflect – Hegel uncritically and Marx critically – the totalising logic of the value-form which imposes itself in such a manner that all relationships become inscribed within it. Now the parallel with Hegel is this: however highly mediated their relations, such forms have that same abstractness as the forms of Hegel’s logic. The shift from his logic to the material world is paralleled in the sinking of the general form of capital into production, by capital grounding itself and its valorisation in a real material process. Through this it has sunk into its substance (in Hegelian language). So capital as ‘spirit’, so to speak, is the return to itself from this ‘self-externality’ (in Hegel Nature is ‘the self-externality of the Idea’ 42) with all that has been won from its sojourn in otherness and ‘finitude’ – battling with unreliable machinery and recalcitrant workers – namely, the surplus-value arising from the material production process constituted ideally by capital as its own valorisation process. If we look at the parallels between Hegel’s logic and the value-form we find that the immediacy, emptiness and self-referring nature of the categorial structure is parallel to the same characteristics in the development of the forms of value: commodity, money, capital. Then the self-externality of Nature, whose truth is outside itself in the categoriality of its logical principles, is paralleled in the case of the form of capital by its embodiment in a world of production which as such seems to have a purely material existence, but whose ‘truth’ lies in its significance as a process of valorisation whereby the social surplus product is simultaneously constituted as total surplus-value. Capital is peculiar, and an illuminating way of pointing out its peculiarity is to make a parallel with Hegel. More precisely, that reading which sees him as illegitimately (and indeed undialectically) privileging logic would be that connection; as logic is supposed to govern the material world so the pure forms of value are supposed to govern the mode of production in capitalism. The term ‘supposed to’ is the tricky one and is a reference to the aporetic quality of the relation in both


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cases: between logic and the world, on the one hand, and between capital and material production on the other. The truth of logic is supposed to be self-fulfilling; the forms are their own content and their development results in a perfectly self-comprehending ‘Absolute’. Yet Hegel admitted that ‘the Concept as such is not complete, but must rise to the Idea, which is the unity of the Concept and reality’. However ‘the reality which the Concept gives itself must not be received by it as something external but must, in accordance with the requirement of science, be derived from the Concept itself’. 43 In the parallel case, at the outset it appears merely that a necessary condition of the ideality of value is the materiality of use-value; then form and matter are united when capital drives to shape this matter into a content penetrated through and through by value in process. But the difficulty capital has in sinking into production, where it has to grapple with its ‘other’ and gets bogged down in the finitude of obsolescent machinery and striking workers, in paralleled in the difficulty Hegel has in giving an account of how the logical forms go over to the real world and function as its rational coherence. So we have two apories. In Hegel, does the dialectic of ‘The Concept’ create the world or simply appropriate it in thought? This question is paralleled by the question, does capital create wealth or does it simply expropriate under its own forms the wealth derived from labour and nature? But this last is not just a theoretical question (how do we make sense of capital?); since capitalism was historically produced a resolution could be posited historically. Is labour nothing but a reified factor of production, or could it become capital’s gravedigger? This can be decided only in practice. The hegemony of capital makes ‘the Ideas’ a real power in the world. Should the proletarians overthrow capital they would overthrow this its spiritual apotheosis. Marx’s intention that ‘the presentation’ of the commodity-capitalist system should be at the same time ‘a critique’ of it44 follows from the observation that it is precisely its homology with the forms of Hegel’s logic that condemns the object as an inverted reality systematically alienated from its bearers, an object which in its ‘spiritualisation’ of material interchange and practical activity into the heaven of pure forms virtually incarnates the Hegelian ‘Idea’. 45 In sum: the critique of capital is analogous to the critique of Hegel but, where in the latter case we criticise a philosophical mistake, in the former case we criticise an (historically produced) inverted reality. To say this is ipso facto to criticise capital for the same things as Hegel’s philosophy; and to say Hegel

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is relevant just because he is wrong for his wrongness models what is wrong with capital. That is why his logic can be turned back on it, and that is why capitalism stands condemned, just because it instantiates an idealist logic with the inversion that displaces creativity from labour to capital.

Notes 1 Marx said in 1844: ‘Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy.’ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in K. Marx and F. Engels Collected Works, 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), p. 333. At that time, as I explain in my book The Dialectics of Labour: Marx and His Relation to Hegel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), he concentrated on relating Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to his own thoughts on productive activity and alienated labour. Here I use a different parallel by taking seriously Marx’s 1867 characterisation of capital as a ‘subject’ (Capital, ch. 4) and connecting this to Hegel’s ‘Idea’ in the Science of Logic. 2 The approach is similar to that of Patrick Murray who develops it in a section entitled ‘Hegel’s Absolute Idealism as the Philosophical Reflection of the Logic of Capital’ in his Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1988) pp. 212ff. This work is full of insights into Marx’s ‘critique of the shared logic of modern philosophy and classical political economy’ (p. 87). 3 K. Marx, Grundrisse, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1976), Abt. II, Band 1.1, p. 36. 4 H. Williams, Hegel, Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 69, 67, 56. 5 Williams, Hegel, Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic, p. 157. 6 Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s ‘Capital’ (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990). Similar views are expressed in G. Reuten and M. Williams, Value-Form and the State (London: Routledge, 1989); also in I. Fraser ‘Two of a Kind: Hegel, Marx, Dialectic and Form’, in Capital & Class, 61 (1997). 7 Smith, The Logic of Marx’s ‘Capital’, pp. 8–9. 8 Smith, The Logic of Marx’s ‘Capital’, pp. 20–1. 9 K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, tr. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1976), p. 103. 10 In spite of his trenchant critique of Hegel’s idealism, in Capital itself Marx openly avowed himself ‘the pupil of that mighty thinker’. But in my own study of his work I have concluded that Marx himself was confused about the relevance of Hegel’s logic. Accordingly, I believe it is necessary to reconstruct the critique of capital in accordance with the principles of systematic dialectic, and value-form analysis, more consistently and explicitly than Marx. See also my ‘Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital’, in F. Moseley, ed., Marx’s Method in ‘Capital’: A Reexamination (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993). For systematic dialectic, see T. Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital. See also T. Smith, Dialectical Social Theory and its Critics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), G. Reuten and M. Williams, Value-Form and the State, and


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C. J. Arthur, ‘Systematic Dialectic’, Science & Society, 62, 3 (Fall 1998). Valueform analysis descends from a seminal paper by H.-G. Backhaus: only valueform analysis ‘allows the essential difference between Marx’s and classical analysis to be brought out’. H.-G. Backhaus, ‘On the Dialectics of the Value Form’, Thesis 11, 1 (1980), p. 103. It also features in the work of Reuten and Williams. K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Collected Works, 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), p. 19. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, tr. T. F. Garaets et al. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), §215. The target is obviously Schelling who (following Spinoza) viewed the Absolute as a neutral identity underlying both the subject (Mind) and the object (Nature). K. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, ed. F. Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), p. 809. K. Marx, Das Kapital, 1, Marx–Engels Werke, Bd. 23 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1983), p. 169. Fowkes, translating Marx’s reference to capital as übergreifende Subject, gives ‘dominant subject’ (K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, tr. Fowkes, p. 255). ‘The notion of a real inverted (mis)representation of a real object, generated by the object concerned, is readily accommodated with a non-empiricist, stratified ontology, such as that to which Marx is committed.’ R. Bhaskar, ‘Dialectic’, in Tom Bottomore, ed., Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 147. A. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, (finished by 1951, not published until 1970), tr. M. Sohn-Rethel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 5, 6, 23, 19–20. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, pp. 30–1. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, pp. 32–3. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, tr. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 198. S. Mohun, ed., Debates in Value Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994) pp. 18–19. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 138–9. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, tr. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985), p. 9. I have been anticipated in this view by K. Uno and his followers T. Sekine and M. Itoh. Uno, in his Principles of Political Economy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980) argued that first it is necessary to outline a ‘Doctrine of Circulation’ before coming to a ‘Doctrine of Production’. Thus I differ from Marx in that I do not believe it is either necessary or useful to address the status of the product of labour until after conceptualising capital as a form-determination. The two important examples of formanalysis in Capital are the derivation of money in Chapter 1, section 3 on The Form of Value, and the derivation of capital in the chapters on The Metamorphoses of Commodities (Ch. 3 sec. 2) and The General Formula For Capital (Ch. 4). These arguments do not depend in any way on a labour theory of the value content, it should be noted. Money is derived as the only adequate expression of value, the necessary mediator of commodity circulation, and the form of surplus value in monetary circulation. It is when Marx asks how surplus value arises on the basis of equivalent exchange (Ch. 5)

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Christopher J. Arthur that the analysis of circulation alone proves inadequate and that he is forced to turn to production. Compared with the equivalent section of my ‘Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital’ there is much more compression; thus the earlier text should also be consulted. I owe this point to Geert Reuten: see his ‘The Difficult Labor of a Theory of Social Value’, in Moseley ed. Marx’s Method in ‘Capital’, p. 106. ‘Substance’ is a category going back to Aristotle; in his view a substance exists on its own account and is the bearer of accidents and relations. So this is a very important turning point; from exchange of commodities we reached the notion of value as a putative property of commodities but now value is itself posited as a substance and the bodily shape of commodities is merely its form of appearance. This inversion of subject and predicate has the peculiar consequence that two substances are now coexistent – the use-value and the value. Scott Meikle, ‘The Metaphysics of Substance in Marx’, in The Cambridge Companion to Marx, ed. T. Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) has taken this position. Marx, Grundrisse, Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe, II 1.1, p. 189. Patrick Murray has made a similar point: ‘In the concept of capital, that substance [value] reveals itself as self-activating – as subject.’ Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge, p. 216. Cf. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, §213. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, §95. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, tr. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 842. See Thomas T. Sekine, An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), Vol. 1, p. 87, for useful remarks on merchant capital and money-lending capital. K. Marx, Grundrisse, Collected Works, 28 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), pp. 186–7; Grundrisse, Collected Works, 29 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), p. 479. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, §151 Addition. Strangely enough, the above-mentioned Sohn-Rethel refrains from this; his focus is on exchange (rather than capital) and the way the doubling of form consequent on it is expressed in the dualism of Kantian philosophy. In speaking of money as accomplishing a ‘social synthesis’ he deliberately echoes Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception. What he fails to say is that Hegel’s attempt to unify the oppositions of Kant in an all-inclusive Absolute replicates capital’s positing of commodities and money as mere moments of its circuit. But Patrick Murray points to the parallel between Hegel’s ultimate failure to supersede Enlightenment philosophy and the fact that ‘when capital supersedes the dualistic, reflective logic of the sphere of commodity circulation, it merely absolutises the rule of value’. Murray, Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge, p. 213. If we add that as an unmediated relation of difference (commodities) and identity (money) the logic of merchant capital may be labelled in Hegelian language as a ‘structure of essence’ it may be objected that since it is an instance of the general formula of capital this contradicts our earlier imputation of the logic of the concept to this form. However, there is no contradiction here if it is remembered that Hegel distinguished three spheres: Logic,


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Nature, Spirit. Since Logic deals with itself it is in one way a simple immediacy as Hegel explains (Encyclopaedia, §381 Addition), and in the ‘logic’ of the major triad (L-N-S) the Logic represents the one-dimensionality of Being, Nature represents the sphere of difference as against the self-identical thoughts of the Logic; hence its relationship to the Idea is here constituted as a version of the logic of essence. Spirit is the unity of identity and difference because spiritual realms regulate themselves by applying the form of the concept to their own content. Now this picture applies in our case in the following way: the general formula of capital is equivalent to the Concept but with merchant capital this form stands in opposition to the production of its content. This capital thus fails properly to unify form and content and the logic is therefore a logic of essence. Industrial capital, although it subsumes production, is still at first somewhat similar, because to begin with it takes production as it finds it and merely formally subsumes it within its valorisation process. Only when industrial capital really subsumes production and shapes it so as to eliminate all obstacles to the imperative of valorisation is there warrant for identifying its principle with the structure of the concept. i.e. it is then in reality what it is in concept, it has become Absolute Idea. Sekine makes the point: ‘Marx has always stressed the so-called “contradiction between value and use-values”, which means that the abstract-general (infinite) principle of capital represented by “value” and the concretespecific (finite) reality of human economic life represented by “use-values” do not mix naturally.’ Sekine, An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital, p. 9. This contradiction plays a major role in Sekine’s ‘dialectic of capital’. See M. A. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 85. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977), p. 10 An Inquiry into those principles respecting the nature of demand and the necessity of consumption lately advocated by Mr. Malthus (London 1821) p. 21. Incidentally, Marx called this ‘one of the best of the polemical works of the period’. K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Collected Works, 32 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), p. 305. As Patrick Murray says: ‘Marx realised [Hegel’s] inversion reflected the historical inversion of life under capitalism, where the animated abstraction capital assumed priority over nature and humanity.’ Murray, Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge, p. xvi. But ‘By trying to enforce the hegemony of abstractions in a world which is not abstract, capitalism proves itself contradictory’ (p. 45). In his significant study, The Logic of Marx’s ‘Capital’, Tony Smith does not map the categories of the Logic onto Capital (a procedure to which he objects in principle) but merely applies to its three volumes the general principle of logical movement as he conceives it i.e. identity/difference/unity-of-identity-and-difference. In my approach I show why there is homology between the categorial ordering of the value-form and of Hegel’s Logic. So whereas for Smith the sphere of economic relations is ‘principled’ by certain logical structures, for me there is a straight homology (homologic in the strict sense) between the categories of logic and value, and the same kind of ontology is built up when the Idea is actual and when capital realises itself

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Christopher J. Arthur through grounding its own valorisation. In my reconstruction the failure to absolutise itself that capital may experience lies at the level of the opposition of the value-form and the material metabolism; in particular it may fail to reify labour; in Hegelian terms it lies at the interface of Logic and Realphilosophie. Smith marks its limit in a different way; he pinpoints it at the level of the inability of capital to achieve the categorial structure of the Concept. At best value is a substance, but cannot be subject – only human beings can be subjects. But for me capital has the logical form of a subject but still requires to prove itself through harnessing its material basis to actualise itself. In a word M-C-M’ is capital ‘in principle’; then it has to be shown how far it can make itself the principle of production. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Science, III, tr. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §381 Addition, pp. 9, 14. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1975), p. 225; Hegel, Science of Logic p. 587. Further typical passages from the Science of Logic: The materials given in experience ‘ought not to be vindicated as the real in contrast to the Concept’ for philosophy ‘assumes the stages of feeling and intuition as precedent to the understanding insofar as they are conditions of its genesis, but conditions only in the sense that the Concept emerges from their dialectic and nothingness as their ground, but not that it is conditioned by their reality’. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, II, pp. 225–6; Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 587–8. Note that the Miller translation misses out a line here, thereby rendering the last clause misleadingly. ‘The Idea’ is ‘the creator of Nature’ and realises itself as ‘Spirit’. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, p. 231; Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 592. ‘As contrasted with these concrete sciences’ of Nature and Spirit (modelled on their logical archetype) ‘logic is a formal science; but it is the science of absolute form which is within itself a totality and contains . . . the pure truth’ (ibid.). Consequently, logic must be regarded ‘as being infinitely more potent in its influence on the concrete than is usually supposed’. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, II, p. 233; Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 594. Marx to Lassalle, February 22, 1858, Collected Works 40 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 220. Lucio Colletti came close to grasping the relevance of Hegel’s dialectic to capital but then panicked. In an interview in the early 1970’s he summed up his reading of Marx as follows: ‘Capitalism is a contradictory reality for Marx, not because being a reality it must therefore be contradictory – as dialectical materialism would have it, but because it is a capsized, inverted, upside-down reality’. L. Colletti, New Left Review, 86 (1974). But, he continues, such a notion ‘appears to jar with the precepts of any science’. By the late 1970’s Colletti himself had chosen to remain faithful to his inherited positivistic idea of science and to reject Marx. In another interview, of 1977, he gave as his reason for abandoning Marxism that Hegel’s dialectic ‘is right there in Capital’ and ‘one cannot do science with the dialectic’. L. Colletti, ‘The Crisis of Marxism’, Mondoperaio (November 1977).

6 Marx’s Doctoral Dissertation: The Development of a Hegelian Thesis Gary K. Browning

This essay argues that Marx’s doctoral dissertation presents a Hegelian reading of the natural philosophies of Epicurus and Democritus which serves as important evidence of Marx’s subscription to a Hegelian style of theorising, which informs his later, more famous works. Marx perceives Epicurean atomism to be superior to Democritean atomism in so far as Epicurus registers the self-determining character of thought and reality. A holistic, conceptual perspective is taken to inform Epicurus’ understanding of concepts, nature and self-consciousness. Marx’s preference for Epicurus over Democritus reflects Marx’s own commitment to what Ollman has termed a philosophy of internal relations.1 Marx takes Epicurus to represent the world as being determined immanently by the principles invoked in its explanation. Epicurean atomism is seen as being opposed to the fabrication of causal explanations which construe things as merely being acted upon by discrete, external factors. Marx’s sophisticated reading of the determination and interpenetration of concepts in Epicurean natural philosophy, reflects Marx’s own capacity to perceive connections between categorial standpoints. It also points to Marx’s subsequent reading of capitalism as a relative, historical mode of production which generates an interrelated set of phenomena demanding explanation, in a holistic conceptual framework. Marx’s reading of Epicurus mirrors Hegel’s way of reading the logic of categories traced in his Logic. In his Logic, Hegel’s entire enterprise is to envisage and explain thought as a self-determining, totality, and Hegel explicitly praises forms of ancient atomism for their invocation of the negativity of thought, the motor of self-determination. 2 Marx in his doctoral dissertation follows and practises a Hegelian mode of argument. He identifies and explains the arguments of Epicurus in Hegelian terms as exhibiting the self-determining character of principles, and the 131

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supremacy of self-consciousness. Marx’s actual deployment of Hegelian argumentative techniques is direct evidence of the profound impact of Hegel upon his thinking at the beginning of the 1840s. Marx’s Hegelianised reading of Epicurus evokes subsequent works such as the Grundrisse the arguments of which run along similar lines. Marx’s mature explanation of capital follows a course charted in the dissertation’s discussion of Democritus and Epicurus. The logical development of capital is a conceptual story of progressive but abortive self-determination, just as Epicurus’ atomism registers distinct but limited progress in its expression of a form of immanent holistic explanation. The distinctiveness of the critical perspective on Marx’s dissertation sketched above is highlighted by the tendency of previous critics in particular Anglo-American critics, to pay insufficient attention to the intrinsic subject matter of the dissertation itself. Commentators on Marx have concentrated upon interpreting Marx’s dissertation by focusing on his explicit remarks on Hegel and the Young Hegelians and his suggestive but elliptical references to the nature of historical development in remarking upon the historical affinity between post-Aristotelian Greece and post-Hegelian Europe. This focus of critical attention can be explained in part by the fascination exerted by the allusiveness of Marx’s comments on these topics and by the interest of commentators in scanning the dissertation for explicit references to names and subjects which occur in Marx’s subsequent works. What has rarely been undertaken is a thorough examination of the style and substantive argument in the thesis. The lack of critical engagement with the substance of Marx’s dissertation is exemplified by McLellan’s compression of its consideration to a footnote in his otherwise excellent book Marx before Marxism. In this note he deflects Marx’s argument concerning the relative superiority of Epicurus’ explanation of nature to that of Democritus by observing that Democritus, as a philosopher and natural scientist, is ‘by far the more profound and original thinker’.3 In fact, Marx’s arguments on the relative merits of Epicurus and Democritus are not to be dismissed so lightly. Marx makes a thoughtful case for the merits of Epicurus. Perhaps more importantly, though, the case he makes is decidedly Hegelian and provides powerful evidence for Marx’s subscription to a Hegelian mode of explanation. Indeed, Marx employs categories and a style of conceptual explanation drawn from Hegel’s Logic. Marx’s substantive use of Hegel suggests that interpretations of the dissertation’s elliptical comments on Hegel, history and the Young Hegelians, which read Marx’s Hegelianism as being refracted completely through Young Hegelian standpoints is

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questionable.4 Marx’s dissertation reflects the influence of the Young Hegelians and their preoccupations, but the substance of the text’s arguments also reveals a familiarity with, and an expertise in deploying, the concepts and model of conceptual explanation entertained by Hegel himself in the Logic.

Marx on Hegel and the Young Hegelians The major concern of this essay is with the substance and style of Marx’s argument in his dissertation. Initially, however, the fragmentary explicit references in the dissertation and its accompanying notebooks to Hegel and the Young Hegelians, and the elliptical comments Marx makes on contextual affinities between Hellenic Greece and his own contemporary world, will be considered. These fragmentary remarks raise important questions about how Marx, during the writing of the dissertation, conceived of his relationship to Hegel, Young Hegelian theorists and his own historical situation. They have inspired commentators to see the dissertation as being influenced crucially by Young Hegelian theorists and preoccupations. This essay observes that the remarks are not susceptible to such a neat interpretation. While signalling affinities between Marx and contemporary Young Hegelians, they do not record an exclusive reliance upon Young Hegelian theoretical perspectives. Although the fragmentary remarks are inconclusive, they do point to an independent engagement with Hegel which is confirmed by the actual substantive argument of the dissertation itself. A crucial if equivocal source of Marx’s explicit understanding of his relationship to Hegel, Young Hegelians and his own epoch is a note which has survived to an otherwise missing section of the dissertation entitled ‘General Difference in Principle between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature’.5 In the note Marx reflects upon a current tendency to explain Hegel’s thought at various turns in terms of its accommodation to existing powers. He expresses a dissatisfaction with this style of argument which is seen as reducing a philosophical system to contingent, external considerations. His respect for Hegel and structural explanation is registered in his demand that any such argumentative manoeuvre must frame an explanation of how the philosophical system itself allows for such accommodation. In a series of dense passages, Marx then intimates that the latest turn in the interpretation of Hegel from within the Hegelian school is itself to be explained by the historical tensions generated in the contemporary quest to realise freedom in the world.6 He observes that the impulse to

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translate philosophy into practice involves a revisionary reading of philosophy. ‘Their liberation of the world from un-philosophy is at the same time their own liberation from the philosophy that held them in fetters as a particular system.’ 7 Marx observes that the strains and tensions involved in relating philosophy to the world are responsible for an explicit dualism in the contemporary world. On the one hand, a liberal party emerges which, though committed to philosophical principles, turns to the world and a positive philosophy develops which though embracing what exists turns to a philosophical justification of the status quo. 8 Marx’s delphic thoughts on the contemporary condition of philosophy are supplemented by his remarks upon the affinities between the contemporary condition of philosophy and the post-Aristotelian world of Greek philosophy. These remarks are contained in his notes on Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, which form the Sixth Notebook on Epicurean Philosophy, one of a series he made in preparation for the composition of his doctoral dissertation. The post-Aristotelian and postHegelian worlds are seen as of a piece in that philosophy having ‘sealed itself off to form a consummate total world’ turns itself to a practical relationship to a world which is set apart from the philosophical system.9 The form that philosophy assumes in the aftermath of consummate systems such as those constructed by Aristotle or Hegel is taken to be one which highlights subjective self-consciousness, as is exemplified in Epicurean philosophy, and Marx observes that the character of such a period ‘is an iron time, happy when characterised by titanic struggles’.10 Marx’s expression of his views on the context and character of Epicurean philosophy in the Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy is echoed in the prefatory remarks he offers in the dissertation itself. At the outset of the dissertation he observes that the post-Aristotelian philosophies of Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism express forms of subjective self-consciousness which serve as prototypes for subsequent development in Ancient Rome.11 Marx’s estimate of post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy is related to but distinct from Hegel’s reading of its character. Hegel disparages post-Aristotelian philosophy as ‘not objective but dogmatic and [it] rests on the impulse of self-consciousness to self-satisfaction . . . Selfconsciousness lives in this solitude of its thought . . . ’12 Marx follows Hegel in recognising its assertion of a limited, abstract form of subjective self-consciousness, but he sees it as presaging spiritual self-understanding and political development. Commentators such as Rosten, Beronovitch, McLellan and Kolakowski signal the influence of Young Hegelian theorists


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in shaping Marx’s more positive reading of Epicurus and other postAristotelian Greek philosophers. The plausibility of this interpretation is evidenced by the contemporary significance attached to the postAristotelian period by Koppen the Young Hegelian and close associate of Marx, who likened the German Enlightenment to Greek theorists of self-consciousness.13 Marx’s reading of the contemporary significance of the context of the Epicurean philosophy of self-consciousness reflects the standpoint of Bruno Bauer, the acknowledged leader of the Young Hegelians. Rosten, in his book Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, makes a convincing case that Marx’s dissertation reveals Marx’s affiliation to distinctive philosophical positions maintained by Bauer.14 Marx follows Bauer in his dissertation in seeing the context of post-Aristotelian philosophies as one of an apocalyptic struggle in which the positive, critical spirit of Epicurean self-consciousness subsequently informs the political culture of Ancient Rome. The influence of Bauer on Marx is also evident in the strident atheism maintained in Marx’s dissertation, in which religion is seen not in the Feuerbachian terms of a translation of human qualities onto a divine substitute, but as the transposition of sub-human qualities onto an imaginary divine object.15 Rosten, like Beronovitch, sees the affinities between Marx and Bauer as amounting to an identity of standpoint. Rosten reads the note in the dissertation, referred to previously, which deals with the split in Hegelianism between a liberal school and a positive philosophy as indicating Marx’s support for the liberal party, led by Bauer. ‘The liberal party obviously symbolises the Young Hegelians of whom Marx was part and therefore Marx identifies himself completely with it.’16 This judgement is at the very least highly questionable. Marx’s remarks on the break-up of the Hegelian school into two parties is elliptical, but he is by no means clearly endorsing the liberal party of Young Hegelians. While he appears sympathetic to Young Hegelian goals, he observes that a more rational standpoint requires a less contradictory relationship between theory and practice. Marx observes, ‘The first [the liberal party], however, is despite its inner contradiction, conscious of both its principle in general and its goal.’17 The ambiguous character of Marx’s depiction of the Young Hegelian liberal party intimates that Marx in his doctoral thesis cannot be assumed merely to align himself with Young Hegelian doctrines. Marx’s diagnosis of the standpoints of the rival Hegelian standpoints as contradictory, as Kolakowski has recognised, signals his adherence to a more unified relationship between theory and practice to which Hegel himself

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subscribed. 18 There is additional evidential support in the dissertation for Marx’s concern to see a mutual accommodation between actual experience and practical volition. Marx observes that sense experience is an alignment between the sensuous human and the sensuous world which is observed. The explicit testimony in the dissertation on Marx’s estimate of Hegel and his reading of the relative merits of Young Hegelian and classically Hegelian standpoints is insubstantial. None the less, Marx registers a sufficiently independent outlook to disturb the categorisation of Marx by McLellan and Brazill, as a second generation Hegelian, whose Hegelianism is essentially mediated through Young Hegelian perceptions. 19 Marx’s dissertation and subsequent works register preoccupations and standpoints assumed by Young Hegelian theorists with whom Marx collaborated and socialised. Marx, however, read Hegel closely and his thinking reflects a personal engagement with Hegel. 20 Marx’s actual review of the natural philosophies of Epicurus and Democritus in his dissertation exhibits a sophisticated understanding and manipulation of Hegelian concepts which register an affinity with Hegel’s systematic, holistic manner of theorising. Marx’s practice of a systematic form of Hegelian theorising is powerful direct evidence of his assimilation of a Hegelian standpoint in which Hegel himself is not seen as a mere precursor of Young Hegelian developments. The substance of Marx’s doctoral dissertation is devoted to a comparative study of the natural philosophies of Epicurus and Democritus. Marx shows a detailed knowledge of the ancient authorities on the two philosophers, and he draws upon and interprets the works of Diogenes Laertius, the Epicurean Treatises of Plutarch, Cicero’s Dialogues and relevant sections of the works of Clement of Alexandria and Sextus Empiricus. Marx rejects the dominant ancient tradition, assumed in the intellectual histories of his time, that Epicurus adopted the atomism of Democritus, making only slight and retrograde changes. Marx observes that Epicurus maintains a distinct perspective on knowledge and reality, which supersedes that of Democritus by its respect for the principle of free self-determination. Marx takes Democritus as being preoccupied with observing trails of causal determination linking natural phenomena, whereas Epicurus is seen as highlighting the immanent self-determination of thought patterns which is fully realised in self-consciousness. Marx recognises that these opposing perspectives are the standpoints assumed in practice by philosophers whose reported views on reality and knowledge involve paradoxes. Democritus is held to consider that only the atoms and the void possess reality while maintaining that truth lies in appearance. Epicurus, on the other hand, is observed to be


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represented as dogmatically asserting that truth lies in sensation while limiting his interest in, and study of empirical phenomena to, the ascertaining of evidence which is compatible with ataraxy, that is a state of mind which is not troubled by pain and fear. This general reading of Epicurus and Democritus informs Marx’s account of particular aspects of their natural philosophies. Epicurus is taken by Marx as affirming the principle of self-determination maintained in thought and reality by allowing for the motion of atoms to decline from a straight line. This declination, for Marx, is testimony to the immanent determination of the atoms in Epicurus’ philosophy, whereas Democritus is seen as providing only for the external determination of atoms. Again, Epicurus, in contrast to Democritus, is taken by Marx as distinguishing the formal, self-moving character of atoms from their material properties. Above all, perhaps, Epicurus is interpreted as refusing to view the heavenly bodies as exhibiting divine qualities in viewing their movements as explicable by a variety of hypotheses whose value is taken to reside purely in their capacity to remove anxiety from the human observer. This latter consideration emphasises that for Epicurus, in contrast to Democritus, the prospect of human self-consciousness achieving an untroubled state of ataraxy supersedes other considerations, for human thought is taken to be the highest expression of the self-moving powers of thought, which are only abstractly realised in the motion of atoms. Bailey, in an article published in Classical Quarterly shortly after the initial publication of Marx’s dissertation, and in contrast to the critical position generally ascribed to him, commends Marx’s general account of Democritus and Epicurus.21 Bailey sees Marx as undertaking a scholarly review of Democritus and Epicurus which is original and generally convincing in its separation of Epicurean from Democritean atomism. Moreover, the source of the major criticism which Bailey offers is most revealing. He observes how Marx, ‘[l]ike a true Hegelian, having once got his fundamental principle . . .attempts to apply it in its workings throughout the theories of the two philosophers. And here, from a modern point of view is the weakness of the thesis. An a priori theory couched in the terms of contemporary philosophy, is forced upon ancient thinkers who really approached their problems in a far simpler frame of mind.’22 Bailey recognises the propriety of a reading of Epicurus which distinguishes his natural philosophy from Democritus’ in a number of ways. He is not persuaded, however, that these differences can be explained as deriving from a supposedly systematic rehearsal of the role

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of self-determination in Epicurean natural philosophy. For Bailey, this is to read Epicurus illicitly in the light of a Hegelian standpoint. The validity of Bailey’s critique is arguable. Marx makes a good case for his reading of Epicurus, but prolepsism informs the practice of even the most subtle of intellectual historians such as Hegel and Collingwood. 23 In any event, the Epicurean natural philosophy which Marx appraises as superseding Democritean atomism is identified and explained by Marx in Hegelian conceptual terms. The priority assigned to immanent self-determining conceptual explanation which Marx imputes to Epicurus reflects the priority assigned to the notion in Hegel’s Logic. The category of the notion, for Hegel, represents the self-determining character of thought itself. Hegel observes, ‘The Notion is not indeterminate but is in its own self determinate . . . ’24 Marx reads Epicurus as explaining reality in terms of the systematic identity of self-determining thought, epitomised by the freedom of self-consciousness, and this reading is an expression of a Hegelian understanding of reality and its immanent philosophical comprehension. For Marx, Democritus looks to the model of causal explanation whereby all aspects of reality are to be explained by their determination by external forces. Epicurus, in contrast, is seen as explaining reality as exemplifying the mutual interconnectedness and self-determination of thought. Marx sees the differences between Epicurus and Democritus as emerging clearly in Epicurus’ distinctive conceptualisation of the declination of the atom from the straight line. What is common to the atomism of both Epicurus and Democritus, for Marx, is that the basic elements of reality are conceived as being atoms in a void, and that two forms of motion, namely falling in a straight line and repulsion from one another, are ascribed to the atoms. What distinguishes Epicurus from Democritus, according to Marx, is the notion of atoms departing slightly from a straight line in their fall. Whereas some ancient authorities disparage as either frivolous or misconceived Epicurus’ account of this form of motion, Marx sees it as exemplifying the pure form of selfdetermination on the part of atoms. Marx observes that in so far as the atom is conceived of as a point or as moving in a straight line it is seen as relative to space, and surrenders its individuality. Motion that declines from a straight line, however, attests to ‘being pure form, negation of all relativity, of all relation to another mode of being’. 25 For Marx, declination from movement in a straight line represents the negation of relative and external determination. It is the negation of a negation, the transcending of otherness, which Hegel in the Logic takes as being the trademark of being-for-self a


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category registering categorial self-determination. 26 Epicurus’ representation of this form of motion as the negation of external causation is taken by Marx as registering abstract individuality, which Hegel in the Logic characterised as self-mediation and ’absolute negativity’.27 Marx sees Epicurus as developing his notion of atomic individuality in his account of the repulsion of atoms from one another. 28 Marx accepts Lucretius’ reading of Epicurean repulsion whereby the atoms’ mutual repulsion is generated by the negation of relative determination, which is effected in the declination of their movement from a straight line. Marx depicts this notion of self-determination in language which he self-consciously construes as evoking a concept of Geist which forms the basis of Hegel’s philosophy: ‘the immediately existing individuality is only realised conceptually, in as much as it relates to something else which actually is itself . . . ’29 Hegel himself had conceptualised repulsion in similar terms, observing, ‘The negative relation of the one to itself is repulsion.’30 Marx notes that Epicurus, in discussing the qualities ascribed to atoms, is concerned to maintain the formal concept of the atom as selfdetermining. This is effected by Epicurus’ predication of contrary specific and determinate qualities to the atom which undermines their fixity, and allows for the immanent self-determination of the atoms. Marx notes that in ascribing shape and size to atoms Epicurus does not envisage infinite specifications, for this infinity would entail a purely relative determination of qualities which derogates from the individual self-determination of atoms. Likewise, the atoms are conceived as possessing weight, but only comparatively, for the determination of weight in terms of a specifiable centre of gravity outside of themselves would undermine their formal power of self-determination. Hence, Epicurus is seen by Marx as investing the specification of the qualities of atoms with contradictions to allow for the individuality of atoms. Marx observes, ‘He [Epicurus] therefore determines all qualities in such a way that they contradict themselves.’31 Marx also interprets the dualistic manner of Epicurus’ treatment of the atom as exemplifying a recognition of the distinction to be drawn between formal powers of self-determination and specific, material nature of atoms as basic constituents of reality. For Marx, Epicurus sees the atom as both a principle and a material entity, whereas Democritus is credited with a merely materialistic understanding of the atom. For Marx, Epicurus’ dualism registers the contradictory nature of being and empirical appearance, and in so doing highlights the contrary characters of self-moving conceptual determination and the external determination

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of natural phenomena. Marx see this contradiction as expressing the abstract character of the individuality ascribed to the atom by Epicurus. Marx also notes that the Epicurean account of the infinite rehearses a notion of the self-determining character of thought and being, notwithstanding its tendency to hypostatise aspects of its determination. While Marx takes Epicurus to represent the infinite in distinct ways, at times implying it to stand for an entity separate from other entities, he observes that an ultimate recognition of the infinite as being a process of self-determination on the part of the basic elements of reality is a token of Epicurean conceptual sophistication. This interpretation of the Epicurean notion of the infinite accords with the notion of the good infinite elaborated by Hegel. The good infinite, for Hegel, is not seen as the bad infinity of opposition to the finite masquerading as the indeterminate goal of endless finite activities, but rather as a process of determination by which the finite expresses the free and universal power of thought. 32 Marx observes that the Hegelian notion of bad infinity applies to the endless processes of motion attributed to the atoms by Democritus. 33 Hegel himself recognised that forms of ancient atomism had expressed the character of a good infinite. 34 Epicurus is read by Marx as conceptualising reality in terms of immanent self-determination. Epicurean atomism is taken by Marx as expressing the abstract individuality of the atomic constituents of reality. The individuality of atoms entails that they are conceived as selfmoving; and reality, in turn, is not explained as an endless process of causal determination by external factors. But Marx takes Epicurean atomism as registering at the same time the abstractness of the individuality of atoms; their operations do not bear the express and explicit self-determination of self-conscious human thought. The empirical world of natural phenomena composed of atoms does not exhibit clear examples of processes of immanent self-determination. Contradictions emerge between material phenomena and the formal self-determining character of atoms. The Epicurean notion of time is taken by Marx to be integral to the world of matter and appearance; it is the serial negation and definition of moments of matter. It defines the non-essentiality of matter. Marx sees Epicurus as correlating time to sensuous empirical self-consciousness just as the concept of the atom is the principle of abstract self-consciousness.35 Marx explains Epicurus’ theory of meteors and the celestial bodies as epitomising an Epicurean understanding of the primacy of selfconsciousness. Marx remarks that the Epicurean account of the celestial bodies appears paradoxical on first reading. The heavenly bodies, as


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traditionally understood in classical thought, would appear to offer the prospect of resolving the contradictions within Epicurus’ understanding of reality. Epicurus is taken by Marx as perceiving contradictions between the formal explanation of atoms and their general material manifestation, but the heavenly bodies, in so far as they are traditionally conceived as eternal and unchangeable, possessing a centre of gravity within themselves, would appear to represent coherent material embodiments of the abstract self-determining individuality of atoms. The paradox of the Epicurean account of meteors and the heavenly bodies, for Marx, resides in the Epicurean dismissal of a single and particular explanation of meteors which would, in effect, designate meteors as concrete individuals capable of self-determination. The seemingly paradoxical Epicurean dismissal of a single necessary explanation of meteors is governed, in Marx’s reading of Epicurean natural philosophy, by a concern to preserve the equanimity of self-consciousness. Marx observes that the Epicurean determination to explain meteors by a variety of hypothetical explanations is designed to maintain the peace of mind of human observers. Marx understands the Epicurean derogation of the status of the celestial bodies as highlighting the principle of abstract self-determining self-consciousness which he interprets as representing the master concept of Epicurean philosophy. 36

The Development of Marx’s Thesis Marx’s dissertation is a Hegelian thesis. Its Hegelian character is revealed by an analysis of its substantive focus on the natural philosophies of Epicurus and Democritus. Marx follows Hegel in taking the Epicurean philosophy as affirming abstract self-consciousness. What the dissertation provides in the detail which Marx signals as being of prime importance in intellectual history, is a decidedly Hegelian reading of the elements of Epicurean natural philosophy.37 Epicurean atomism is appraised as superseding its Democritean predecessor because of its systematic elaboration of an atomism expressing abstract individuality. Where Democritean atomism is explained as assuming the aspect of an unreflective empiricism, Epicurean atomism is interpreted as conceptualising atoms as formally self-determining. Marx’s reading of the conceptual logic of self-determinism in Epicurean atomism reflects Hegel’s conception of the logic of categories expressed in his Logic. The dialectical understanding of thought undertaken by Hegel is predicated on the free, self-determining power of thought itself, which is expressed in the movement of categories rehearsed in the Logic.

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Hegel himself remarked that ancient atomism in contrast to its modern form expressed something of this self-determining character of thought and reality. In framing his Hegelian account of Epicureanism Marx appraises Epicurus’ conception of infinity as realising the self-related character of Hegel’s conception of a good infinite. This notion of infinity highlights the self-determining character of thought in which the infinite is not taken to be a goal external to finite determinations. Again, Marx’s reading of the Epicurean resolution of abstract individuality into individual self-consciousness reflects the realisation of the human conscious determination of thought in Hegel’s logical category of the notion. Marx’s recognition of the abstract character of this Epicurean resolution of abstract atomic individuality into abstract self-consciousness rehearses the terms of Hegel’s diagnosis of Epicurean philosophy. This evidence of a direct theoretical engagement with Hegel in the expression of Marx’s thesis signals that Marx’s cryptic explicit references to the Young Hegelians and their preoccupations should not be taken as affirming unqualified support for their standpoints. In his dissertation Marx reveals an assimilation and employment of definitive aspects of Hegel’s philosophising and his Hegelianism should not be construed as entirely mediated by Young Hegelian intermediaries. The methodological and conceptual influence of Hegel on Marx, exemplified in the detail of Marx’s reading of Epicurus, informs the methods and concepts maintained in Marx’s subsequent works. It would be absurd to deny the significance and scale of the changes in theoretical standpoint registered in Marx’s writings subsequent to the writing of his thesis of 1840/1. Inter alia Marx famously develops a focused understanding of the alienation of capitalism, an elaborated materialist theory of history and a systematic conception of the logic of capital. What is evident in the dissertation and continues to inform Marx’s subsequent theoretical understanding of capitalism, communism and the division of labour is Marx’s profound affinity for and assimilation of Hegel’s conception of the internally related and immanently determined character of concepts and human practices. Marx construes Epicurean atomism in Hegelian terms as exhibiting abstractly a self-determining character which is expressed most appositely by the self-consciousness which comprehends it. Subsequent to his dissertation, Marx develops a conception of capitalism as a system of internally related phenomena, which are determined by capital that produces and reproduces its own conditions. In my essay ‘Good and Bad Infinities in Hegel and Marx’, this Hegelianised depiction of capitalism is explained in the following way. ‘Capital [for Marx] expresses


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the self-mediating character of the good infinite . . . by acquiring in commodity form fixed and variable capital which it deploys to generate the conditions of its own production.’38 Capital, for Marx, however, is conceived as inwardly flawed and its defectiveness derives from its failure to maintain an inwardly coherent, self-mediating and self-determining system. The process of capitalist production is continually subordinated to an alien, endless pursuit of surplus value. The appeal of communism, for Marx, in his elaboration of it in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, derives from its coherent expression of the self-determining and internally related powers of the individual and the species in producing a human world in which the social powers and needs of individuals are harmonised and satisfied. 39 This conception of communism as self-determining and self-mediating reflects Hegel’s conception of thought determining itself. Marx’s concentrated critique of the division of labour in his most elaborated theoretical account of historical development involves a recognition of the contradiction expressed in the externality of relations obtaining between human beings in class societies. It testifies to Marx’s sensitivity to the alienation involved in an organisation of production in which men and women are externally related to one another and do not collectively determine the conditions of their own social and productive lives. 40 Throughout his intellectual and political career Marx maintained a Hegelianism in attending to the internal relations between the concepts invoked to explain reality and in recognising the self-determining character of human social life and the contradictions to which the process of social self-determination is liable. Marx’s Hegelianised reading of Epicurus offers an understanding of concepts and human subjectivity in terms of a non-mechanistic notion of immanent movement and selfdetermination which is invoked in Marx’s subsequent critique of capital and conceptualisation of communism. Livergood in his book, Activity in Marx’s Philosophy, observes, ‘in Epicurus Marx discovered an idea capable of transforming materialism into a complete system of thought – a system able to explain change in non-mechanistic terms.’41 Livergood’s observation is apposite if its validity is recognised to turn upon Marx’s discovery of the Epicurean idea as being inspired by Hegel’s non-mechanistic understanding of conceptual change and development.

Notes 1 For an engaging account of Marx as a theorist of internal relations, see B. Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

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2 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, tr. A. V. Miller (London and New York: George, Allen and Unwin, 1976), pp. 165–6. 3 D. McLellan, Marx Before Marxism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 83. 4 See McLellan, Marx Before Marxism, p. 75, and W. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 90. 5 K. Marx, Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, 1 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), pp. 84–7. 6 Marx, Difference Between, p. 85. 7 Marx, Difference Between, p. 86. 8 Marx, Difference Between, p. 86. 9 K. Marx, Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, 1, p. 491. 10 Marx, Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, p. 492. 11 Marx, Difference Between, p. 35. 12 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1 tr. E. S. Haldane and F. H Simson (London & New York: Kegan, Paul, Trench & Tryber, 1892), pp. 223–4. 13 For an account of the influence of Koppen, see L. Beronovitch, ‘Two Appendices to a Doctoral Dissertation. Some New Light on the Origin of Karl Marx’s Dissertation from Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians’, in The Philosophical Forum, Vol. VIII, nos 2–4, Feuerbach, Marx and the Left Hegelians, pp. 221–2. The relevant texts of Rosten, McLellan and Kolakowski, which point up the impact of Young Hegelians on Marx are referred to elsewhere in this essay. Studies of Marx’s dissertation in German and French have been close and scholarly, but do not disturb the dominant anglophone reading of Marx as developing via the Young Hegelians rather than through a direct engagement with Hegel. 14 Z. Rosten, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977). 15 Rosten, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, p. 134. 16 Rosten, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, p. 160. 17 Marx, Difference Between, p. 86. 18 L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 1 (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1978), pp. 104–5. 19 McLellan, Marx Before Marxism, p. 75 and Brazill, The Young Hegelians, p. 90. 20 See Marx’s account of his personal engagement with Hegel in his Letter From Marx to His Father, November 1837, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, 1, pp. 10–21. In this letter Marx reveals that he got to know Hegel from beginning to end. 21 C. Bailey, ‘Karl Marx on Greek Atomism’, The Classical Quarterly, XXII (1928). 22 Bailey, ‘Karl Marx on Greek Atomism’, p. 206. 23 For critiques of Hegel and Collingwood as historians of philosophy, see my articles, ‘Hegel’s Plato: The Owl of Minerva and a Fading Political Tradition’, Political Studies, XXXVI (1988), and ‘New Leviathans For Old’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 2 (1995), in which Hegel’s account of Plato and Collingwood’s reading of Hegel and Hobbes are criticised. 24 Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, p. 597. 25 Marx, Difference Between, p. 48.


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Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, ch. 3. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, p. 618. Marx, Difference Between, pp. 51–3. Marx, Difference Between, p. 52. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, p. 168. Marx, Difference Between, p. 54. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, pp. 137–56. Marx, Difference Between, p. 53. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, pp. 165–6. Marx, Difference Between, pp. 63–5. Marx, Difference Between, pp. 66–73. Marx, Difference Between, p. 36. G. K. Browning, ‘Good and Bad Infinities in Hegel and Marx’, in I. Hampsher-Monk and J. Stanyer, eds, Contemporary Political Studies 1996, Vol. 2 (Belfast: Political Studies Association of the UK, 1996), p. 915. 39 K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in K. Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 350. 40 For an account of the division of labour in The German Ideology, see my ‘The German Ideology: The Theory of History and the History of Theory’, History of Political Thought, 14/3 (1993). 41 N. Livergood, Activity in Marx’s Philosophy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), p. 3. 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

7 Hegel and Marx on Needs: the Making of a Monster Ian Fraser

Need and labour . . . form on their own account a monstrous system of community . . . ; a life of the dead body, that moves itself within itself, one which ebbs and flows in its motion blindly, like the elements, and which requires strict dominance and taming like a wild beast. 1 Hegel Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour . . . By incorporating living labour-power into the material constituents of capital, the latter becomes an animated monster. 2 Marx

For Hegel and Marx, the simple satisfaction of needs leads to the creation of a society that becomes an animated, monstrous beast over individuals. Both focus on this development through the contradictory movement of human beings in the shaping and making of their world. Hegel concentrates on the subject as Will manifesting itself in society through the satisfaction of its needs. Marx’s concern is with workers’ antagonistic satisfaction of their needs within capital. To understand properly how Hegel and Marx comprehend this development requires reference to their methods. Hegel operates with a universal and particular concept that finds direct correspondence in Marx’s general and determinate abstractions.3 Both thinkers understand the determinate abstraction and the particularisation to be forms; that is, the mode of existence of the general abstraction or universal concept in society. Both begin by analysing these forms to discover their inner 146

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connection. Consequently, they analyse the forms needs take in society. They have a universal concept and general abstraction of ‘natural needs’ which they contend applies across all societies. However, they also realise that these ‘natural needs’ will be satisfied in many different forms. Analysing these need-forms will reveal the dialectical basis of need satisfaction. It will show how humans, through the attempt to satisfy their ‘natural needs’, can create a world which seems to dominate them. Attention to form is essential therefore for a proper understanding of needs in Hegel’s and Marx’s writings. Charting the path to the creation of the monster begins with a discussion of the universal concept and general abstraction of ‘natural need’, The various forms these ‘natural needs’ take are then elucidated, starting with needs satisfied in a particular form; the mediation of labour; through to the expansion of needs into luxury. Hegel and Marx capture the contradictions and antagonisms of this process and leave it up to us human beings to slay the very monster we have created.

Natural Needs Both Hegel and Marx share a notion of basic needs which they capture with the term ‘natural needs’. For Hegel, examples of ‘natural needs’, (natürlichen Bedürfnissen)4 are food, drink and clothing.5 ‘Natural needs’ play a crucial role in Hegel’s need theory. They are the universal concept which takes various forms of satisfaction in society. Hegel makes this quite clear when he states: In the element of being as such, the existence and range of natural needs [natürlichen Bedürfnisse] is a multitude of needs [Menge von Bedürfnissen]. The things serving to satisfy those needs are worked up, their universal inner possibility posited [expressed] as outer possibility, as form.6 Individuals continually have to satisfy their ‘natural needs’ to live. They do this in many different forms of need satisfaction; from immediate to deferred gratification. ‘Natural needs’ exist, therefore, in the form or mode of existence of a ‘multitude of needs’. Hegel’s concern is to grasp the movement from ‘natural needs’, satisfied in an immediate manner, through various mediations to the form of a ‘multitude of needs’. Marx offers a similar understanding of ‘natural needs’ (natürliches Bedürfniß)7 with ‘food, clothing, fuel and housing’ serving as examples. 8 Indeed, it is in The German Ideology in particular that Marx actually refers

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to Hegel’s influence when emphasising the fundamental nature of having to satisfy such ‘natural needs’.9 Consequently, Marx concludes that ‘the first historical act’ is the ‘production of the means to satisfy [the] needs . . . of eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various other things’. 10 The satisfactions of such needs are a ‘fundamental condition of all history’ and are essential in order to ‘sustain human life’. 11 ‘Natural needs’ are therefore a general abstraction. Such needs are universally present in all societies and must be satisfied for people to continue living. Marx’s concern is to analyse and elucidate the forms these ‘natural needs’ take in capitalist society through a critique of classical political economy. ‘Natural needs’ exist universally in all societies, but in divergent forms of satisfaction. As Marx notes: ‘what could be more varied than the objects that form the staple food of different peoples?’12 So the movement from the general to the determinate abstraction is required to focus on the forms these needs take in a society in a particular historical period. Both Hegel and Marx, therefore, understand ‘natural needs’ as the universal concept and general abstraction respectively which take various forms of satisfaction in society. These forms of need – need-forms – are analysed to discover their inner connection. Hegel and Marx analyse these need-forms to reveal how the simple satisfaction of ‘natural needs’ leads to a complex and overbearing system of need satisfaction. The creation of this monstrous system begins with a particular need-form.

Particular Needs Hegel captures the particular basis to the satisfaction of the universal concept of ‘natural need’ by defining ‘need’ [Bedürfnis] as a ‘feeling of separation’, whereas the overcoming of the feeling of separation is ‘enjoyment’ [Grenuß]. 13 In the Philosophy of Right he delineates this process through the dialectical development of the Will. Hegel argues that the Will can make itself universal by abstracting from ‘needs [Bedürfnisse], desires [Begierden] and drives [Triebe]’.14 When it ‘steps into existence’ and becomes determinate, however, it is particular.15 The Will, in this ‘immediate’ state, now finds itself ‘naturally determined’ by ‘drives, desires and inclinations’ and the ‘needs derived from them’.16 Hegel wants to focus on the ‘objective element’ of these drives, and the ‘shape [Gestaltet] this element assumes in its truth’ and ‘existence’.17 This ‘arbitrary will’ encounters the problem of balancing the satisfaction of these drives with each other.18 As a ‘dialectic of drives [Triebe]’,19 a human therefore has to ‘liberate himself’ from this immediate form of


existence. 20 Humans’ drives must become ‘the rational system of the will’s determination’.21 Humans must not be the prisoners of their drives as a nonhuman animals are. Instead, a human must ‘stand above his drives’ and ‘determine and posit them as his own’. 22 For Hegel, therefore, the Will, in its immediacy, must master its drives and needs in some way in order to be free.23 One ‘shape’ these drives and needs take are particular.24 This is essential to recognise because of Hegel’s emphasis on the importance of form. Hegel understands drives as taking the form of needs that take further forms through the progression of the Will. Hegel begins his discussion with the complete abstraction from needs and drives. These very needs and drives then naturally determine the Will in its immediate form of existence. Such natural determinations are common to everybody – a universal. The Will then externalises itself as a particular Will. Such ‘contingency’ also arises, however, in terms of the needs of individuals. As Hegel notes, the ‘concrete person’ of civil society is a ‘particular person’ who looks only to his or her own end.25 As a ‘totality of needs’ this person is ‘a mixture of natural necessity and arbitrariness’.26 These needs are naturally necessary because a person has to satisfy them to live.27 They are the aforementioned ‘natural needs’. Hegel captures the ‘arbitrary’ aspect of a person’s need with the term ‘contingent need’ that he links with ‘subjective caprice’ – the whims of an individual.28 An individual as a particular being is therefore a combination of both ‘natural needs’ (universal) and ‘contingent needs’ (particular). The person shares the requirement of satisfying ‘natural needs’ with all other human beings. However, in his or her particularity, the person cares only for the satisfaction of his or her own particular or ‘subjective need’, which is ‘opposed to the universal will’ of the rest of society.29 Marx also captures the particular manifestation of the satisfaction of ‘natural needs’. He argues that on the one side humans have ‘vital powers’ which exist within them as ‘drives’.30 On the other side, outside them, exist the object of these drives. These are ‘objects of his need, essential objects, indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his essential powers’. 31 He indicates how in capitalist society humans satisfy their needs egoistically. Marx refers to ‘egoistic need’ as being in conflict with ‘social need’, which is the need of society as a whole expressed as effective demand. So a ‘cobbler’, for instance, satisfies a ‘social need’ (sociales Bedürfniß) through making shoes for others.32 Marx contends that such ‘social needs’ can have a very negative effect on the worker who becomes determined by these ‘social needs’ (gesellschaftlichen Bedürfnisse) which are ‘alien to him and which act upon him with compulsive force’.33 The

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worker submits to this force of ‘social need . . . from egoistic need [egoistischem Bedürfniß], from necessity’.34 This leads Marx to contrast the ‘social need’ of society with the ‘egoistic need’ of the individual. 35 Marx argues that society sees the worker as ‘only the slave that satisfies its needs’.36 Similarly, the worker looks to society only for the satisfaction of his or her own ‘egoistic needs’. Workers are not recognised as human beings – as an end in themselves – but simply as a means to fulfil the ends of others. For Marx, the realm of private property inevitably reduces an individual to an ‘egoistic man’ of civil society who has ‘private desires and interests that are separated from the community’. 37 The only bonds that hold individuals together are ‘natural necessity, need and private interest, the conservation of their property and their egoistic persons’. 38 Individuals relate to each other not as person to person, human to human, but merely as means to the end of satisfying their ‘egoistic needs’. So both Hegel and Marx capture the tensions between the particular and universal or social satisfaction of needs. Such tensions increase through the mediation of labour which eventually results in a rapid expansion of needs and their forms of satisfaction.

The Mediation of Labour For Hegel, labour, as the mediation between need and enjoyment, works on and transforms an object, rather than simply nullifies it. Labour therefore introduces the moment of deferred enjoyment.39 The level to which individuals can satisfy their ‘natural needs’ is ‘contingent’ on factors such as natural resources and labour productivity. 40 Hegel emphasises that the satisfaction of our own needs in civil society mediates with the satisfaction of the needs of others. 41 Such a mediation arises because in satisfying our particular needs we receive the goods produced by other people. Similarly, through our own labour we produce for others to consume. A moment of ‘universality asserts itself’, therefore, out of the very particular satisfaction of our own needs. 42 It is through this dialectical movement between the particular needs of an individual and the universal needs of society that Hegel discerns the development in needs and their satisfaction. In contrast to one person satisfying his or her own needs, now many people become involved. Consequently, their labour ‘applied to the object as an entirety, is partitioned’ which increases productivity and thereby reduces necessity.43 Individuals in the division of labour produce not simply for themselves, but for others, and their particularity takes


on a more universal aspect. However, the division of labour also has the negative effect of making their labour ‘mechanical’ and ‘deadening’.44 Despite this, the increase in productivity means that an individual creates a surplus that goes beyond the satisfaction of a particular person’s need.45 The production of this surplus leads to the process of exchange. The performance of surplus labour means that the link between an individual and part of what he or her has produced becomes broken. The individual has not worked on the object for his or her own need and own use, but for the need of someone else. With the development of the division of labour, and the interdependence this creates between individuals, such control is no longer possible. Individuals work to satisfy their own needs and create a surplus to satisfy the needs of others. The form in which they satisfy these needs is money. As Hegel states: Labour, which leads to a surplus, leads also, when mechanically uniform, to the possibility of universal exchange and the acquisition of all necessities . . . [M]oney is the universal, and the abstraction of these, and mediates them all. 46 Trade follows as money is ‘posited as activity, where surplus is exchanged for surplus’. 47 Hegel argues that this movement from labour to surplus to money leads to the domination of one person over another. The singular individual now exists among a ‘plurality of individuals’. 48 The ‘difference of power and might’ between these individuals results in the relation of master and servant. 49 As Hegel explains: The master is in possession of a surplus, of what is physically necessary; the servant lacks it, and indeed in such a way that the surplus and the lack of it are not single [accidental] aspects but the indifference of necessary needs (notwendigen Bedürfnisse).50 Hegel recognises that in an exchange economy some will dominate and force others to work for them through sheer power and control over the surplus produced. The servant’s lack of the surplus is not ‘accidental’, but instead arises from the ‘indifference of necessary needs’. These ‘necessary needs’ are what we have previously referred to as ‘natural needs’. Satisfying such needs is ‘physically necessary’ for a person to carry on existing. The ‘indifference’ or totality of these ‘necessary needs’ is the surplus and the lack of surplus. For the master and the servant these two aspects take a particular manifestation: the ‘form of

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indifference’ for the master (the surplus) and the form of ‘difference’ in the servant (lack of the surplus). 51 Marx also discusses how ‘natural needs’ are satisfied through the mediation of labour. In making his crucial distinction between labour (the work itself) and labour-power (the capacity to work), he refers to Hegel’s comments in the Philosophy of Right on how the alienation of ‘my power to act’ to someone else indicates how ‘the use of my powers differ from the powers themselves’.52 Marx explains that it is through the expenditure of labour-power that the individual worker uses up ‘a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, etc.’, which he or she has to replace for the valorization process to begin anew. 53 Even a worker’s labouring activity is not an end in itself because it is reduced to nothing more than the ‘maintenance of his individual existence’. 54 The worker’s labours are simply a means to the end of ensuring his or her own physical survival. The problem for the individual as a human being in capitalism, therefore, is that he or she cannot directly satisfy ‘natural needs’ because the means of production are under private ownership. The form or mode of existence within which workers satisfy their ‘natural needs’ in capital is through the mediation of labour and the wage. Expenditure of the wage on goods means that they are positing their needs as necessary – ‘necessary needs’ – within the alienated system of capital.55 So a person is born with ‘natural needs’ that he or she has to satisfy in order to live. To do so he or she has to become a worker and sell themselves as labour-power. The value of this labour-power will determine the worker’s ‘necessary needs’. These ‘necessary needs’ will be the greater the higher the value of labour-power, prices remaining constant. The ‘natural needs’ are therefore being satisfied, but this will be in a qualitatively and quantitatively different way. A high value of labour-power could offer the possibility of accruing meat instead of gruel, for instance, or a rented house instead of a hut. ‘Necessary needs’ are the form that the satisfaction of ‘natural needs’ takes in capital. ‘Natural needs’ are satisfied through the sale of labour-power and in the form of ‘necessary needs’. When workers cannot sell their labour-power, they have to satisfy their ‘natural needs’ in a form that is not mediated through the wage. They have now entered ‘official pauperism, or the part of the working class which has forfeited its condition of existence (the sale of labourpower)’.56 They are thereby reduced to satisfying their ‘natural needs’ in their ‘immediate form’. No positing of ‘necessary needs’ is therefore possible at this level of need-satisfaction.


So within this process of need-satisfaction the extraction of surplusvalue takes place. The struggle over the extraction of surplus-value between capitalist and worker reveals the antagonistic basis to the satisfaction of needs in capitalism.

Opinion and Luxury Need Hegel and Marx further recognise the developmental aspect of needs in their concepts of ‘opinion’ and ‘luxury need’. Hegel indicates how ‘concrete’ or ‘social needs’ divide and differentiate through education.57 Education ‘resolves the concrete into its particulars’, and makes ‘concrete’ or ‘social needs’ take the form of ‘abstract needs’ (abstrakte Bedürfnisse).58 ‘Abstract needs’ are abstract in the sense that particular needs multiply to such a degree that they become relative to the subjective whims and refinement of different individuals.59 As Hegel recognises, this can easily lead to a situation where a need can be ‘created’ by those ‘who seek to profit from its emergence’.60 The multiplication of needs therefore allows the possibility of their manipulation. For Hegel, then, ‘taste and utility become criteria of judgement’ so that ‘it is no longer need but opinion which has to be satisfied’.61 ‘Natural needs’ exist in the form of ‘opinions’ which are linked to a mere fancy or whim. 62 Hegel is understanding the ‘contingent needs’ as taking the form of ‘opinions’ through the multiplication of taste and levels of refinement. For Hegel, the ‘natural need’ for food, for instance, takes the form of a particular or ‘contingent need’ for meat. The latter comes, ‘in the end’, to be an ‘opinion’ for something because it has been subject to the influence of ‘taste and utility’, which is an expression of a person’s character as a ‘spiritual being’.63 As needs multiply in number and variety, people are not as dependent on any one of them – ‘necessity’, therefore, becomes ‘less powerful’.64 So we may be satisfying a ‘natural need’ for food, but this has developed to such a stage that the form it takes is an ‘opinion’ of steak, well done, in a brandy sauce. Hegel’s emphasis on the multiplication of needs to the form of ‘opinions’ is echoed in Marx’s notion of ‘luxury needs’. In the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx suggests that luxury consumption is possible for the working class because certain luxury items can be cheaper than necessary items.65 In Capital, Marx argues, in contrast, that luxury consumption is the preserve ‘only of the capitalist class’. However, he then reverts to his original formulation when he argues that in situations of ‘prosperity’ the ‘working class . . . takes a temporary share in the

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consumption of luxury articles that are otherwise for the most part “necessary” only for the capitalists’. 66 What Marx means here is that at a certain time luxury goods are those which are out of reach of the working class. However, with increases in productivity and spending power these luxuries can, in time, be made ‘necessary’. So when Agnes Heller suggests that ‘luxury needs’ posited as necessary ‘cease to be luxury needs’ some care is required.67 Reference to form means that ‘luxury needs’ posited as necessary have not ‘ceased to be’ luxury needs, but exist in the mode or take the form of ‘necessary needs’. This is important because it allows us to understand the ‘inner connection’ of all need concepts and trace this connection back to class conflict in the production process. As Marx points out, such ‘production is founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour and immediate labour’. 68 Such an antagonism is mediated through the various forms needs take in capital. ‘Luxury needs’, as the preserve of the capitalist class at a point in time, are posited as ‘necessary’ by the working class. Initially, these needs seem diametrically opposed. However, attention to form indicates how needs can mediate into different modes of existence of each other. Recognition of such forms is therefore crucial for a proper understanding of needs in Marx’s writings. With the similarities between Hegel’s and Marx’s understanding of needs elucidated, the next two sections consider how this results in the creation of a monstrous system of need.

Hegel’s Monstrous Community of Need Hegel is fully aware of the problems that the development of need satisfaction can bring. He notes how civil society is an ‘immense power’ which ‘tears’ individuals away from the family and makes them subject to ‘contingency’. 69 The arbitrary nature of people’s existence in the free market, based on inequalities in resources and skills, leads to the emergence of poverty. 70 Individuals reduced to poverty have the ‘needs of civil society’, but are ‘deprived’ of its advantages. 71 The contingency that arises out of ‘subjective help’ to alleviate this distress means that society has to try to offer a more universal solution to the problem. 72 This proves very difficult because of the dialectical operations of the free market. The ‘unrestricted’ development of civil society leads to the positive effect of bringing people together ‘through their needs’, and the various ways in which they satisfy them. 73 But it also leads to the accumulation of wealth and profit in society. Moreover, in the production


process specialisation intensifies, and the nature of work becomes more limited, resulting in the ‘dependence and distress [Not] of the class [Klasse] that is tied to such work’.74 This ‘class’ becomes unable to ‘feel and enjoy the wider freedoms’ and ‘spiritual advantages’ of civil society.75 Hegel introduces various mediations to try to overcome the conflicts that arise out of need satisfaction, most notably the police, corporation and the estates. The police have a direct responsibility to interfere into the free operation of the market system to ensure the welfare of all individuals. The very ‘multiplication’ and ‘interdependence’ that arises from individuals’ ‘daily needs’ leads to universal arrangements for their satisfaction. 76 Hence, Hegel perceives a need for public control over industries on which the whole community are dependent. The public authority therefore requires ‘oversight’ and ‘advance provision’ to ensure collective welfare.77 Hegel includes a wide and extensive number of tasks that the police should undertake to counter the ‘selfish ends’ that are ‘blindly’ followed by supporters of free trade and commerce. 78 With the further mediating institution of the ‘corporation’, individuals come together through recognition of their particular trades and skills, and thereby come into contact with the universal. 79 The corporation, therefore, acts as a ‘second family’ for its members by protecting them against contingency, ensuring a secure livelihood, and offering education to others to enable them to join. 80 Individuals now become conscious of the fact that they are providing for others. 81 The ‘particularity of need and satisfaction’ and ‘abstract legal universality’, are now ‘inwardly united’ within the corporation. 82 The welfare of individuals becomes a ‘right’ and actualises itself within this institution. 83 However, despite these attempts to overcome the contradictions of need-satisfaction, problems still remain, especially with the antagonisms that exist within the estates. Commentators often translate the term ‘estate’ (Stand) simply as ‘class’ (Klasse),84 but, as Allen Wood suggests, Hegel does make a distinction between these two terms. 85 Historically, estates represented ‘constituted bodies of various kinds’ that existed in feudal and early absolutist societies. 86 Such estates offered people ‘social positions and economic roles’ in society.87 In contrast, Hegel sees ‘class’ as referring to ‘ inequalities in wealth upbringing and education ’.88 When Hegel uses the term ‘Stand’, therefore, we must interpret it as ‘estate’ and not as ‘class’ (Klasse). Consequently, different classes can exist within the same estate. This distinction is important because some commentators criticise Hegel for excluding those workers that are ‘directly involved in production’ from these mediating institutions; a criticism that has been levelled at Hegel’s

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early writings as well as the Philosophy of Right.89 According to this view, Hegel brilliantly captures the alienating existence of workers tied to mechanical and factory production without incorporating them into the system of estates. 90 Yet Hegel does refer to the presence of ‘mechanical and factory labour [Fabriksarbeit]’ in the business estate.91 In a strange statement, however, he raises the possibility of sacrificing part of the business estate to the ‘barbarism’ of such labour for the greater good of society.92 Harris has quite rightly suggested how this comment sits oddly with Hegel’s persistent concern with the negative aspects of mechanisation and work in factories.93 Indeed, in the lectures of 1805–6, Hegel explains how a person is ‘alienated’ and ‘no longer counts’ as an individual.94 Instead, society measures a person only by his or here money. Such ‘harshness of spirit’ or ‘complete mercilessness’ is symptomatic of the way ‘factories, manufacturing, base their subsistence on the misery of one class [Klasse]’.95 Similarly, in the Philosophy of Right the estate these workers belong to is the ‘estate of manufacturers’ – a sub-estate of the ‘estate of trade and industry’ – which performs the ‘more abstract work of mass production’. 96 Within this estate is a class of people who suffer particularly through the expansion of civil society. They become a ‘large mass of people’ which ‘sinks below the level of a certain standard of living’. 97 The ‘certain standard of living’ is itself at a ‘level necessary for a member of the society in question’. 98 All members of society should at least be at this minimum level. When people fall below this level they lose the ‘feeling of right, integrity, and honour’ they gained through their work.99 So a mass of people exist who descend into poverty due to the contradictions of civil society. Within their midst arises a section of society who are at the ‘lowest level of subsistence’ which Hegel calls the ‘rabble’.100 Hegel suggests that the minimum level of subsistence ‘defines itself automatically’ as the minimum needed for an individual to live. 101 Constituted socially in this way, it must therefore differ from society to society. The poor, then, are people who are below a certain standard of living for a society. Within the poor are the ‘rabble’ who live at the lowest level of existence. As Hegel states: ‘poverty in itself does not reduce people to a rabble; a rabble is created only by the disposition associated with poverty, by inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the government, etc.’102 The ‘hardship’ associated with poverty is itself a ‘wrong inflicted’ on this ‘class’ [Klasse].103 Moreover, the tendency for ‘disproportionate wealth’ to be ‘concentrated in a few hands’ further exacerbates such a wrong.104


The poor are in a dire situation because they cannot by themselves use the mediation of work to satisfy their ‘natural needs’. Hegel notes how certain societies have attempted to address this problem. One approach is simply to provide the poor with enough to maintain their standard of living without work; but this seems to go against their own self-worth. 105 Another way is to make the poor work for money, but this only increases production, which is the very cause of their impoverished state in the first place. 106 Consequently, Hegel concludes that ‘despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough . . . to prevent an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble’. 107 The natural operation of the market therefore produces poverty. Poverty is not an accident, but emerges from the natural working of the system itself through overproduction, necessitating a movement of goods to other economies to try to dissipate such a glut.108 This allows the development of international trade and law, but also leads to the establishment of colonies. 109 Colonies originate because of the ‘emergence of a mass of people who cannot gain satisfaction for their needs by their work when production exceeds the needs of consumers’. 110 Overproduction and the onset of poverty, therefore, eventually lead to mass emigration. So contradictions abound in civil society. As an ‘immense power’ it not only creates its own victims in the guise of the poor, but pushes itself beyond the boundaries of the nation-state into the rest of the world. The mediating institutions of the estates seem ill-equipped to ensure the satisfaction of everyone’s ‘natural needs’ beyond a meagre level. Similarly, the very expansion of the contradictions of civil society suggests that the police’s attempt to provide some moment of universality could be far from successful. The corporation itself excludes a mass of individuals who will not satisfy their need for recognition and achieve a moment of universality within this institution. Even the emergence of the state as a moment of greater universality offers little to combat the destructive effects of natural necessity in civil society. 111 After all, the dialectical development of the Will goes beyond the boundaries of the state into world history. 112 Moreover, as Hegel declares that the state is actually ‘subordinate’ to ‘world spirit’, then it cannot be an ‘end-point’ of the Will’s dialectical development. 113 Again and again, Hegel presents a constant movement back and forth between universal and particular moments of humans’ progression and satisfaction of their needs. He persistently depicts movements of mediation that turn into opposites. The immediate satisfaction of ‘natural needs’ becomes deferred through the mediations of labour and money.

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The very needs individuals begin with return to haunt them like a monstrous beast which they themselves have created. Not surprisingly, then, Hegel sees the ‘activity of labouring and need’ growing into ‘the movement of the living dead’.114 From Hegel’s initial starting point of need as a feeling of separation in an individual, the result is a huge overbearing system of need-satisfaction mediated through labour and money. Hegel is tracing the form needs and their satisfactions take through the dialectical interaction between their universal and particular moments. It is a little strange, therefore, that Lukács can criticise Hegel for ignoring the fact that crises of the economic system are due to contradictions within the system itself. 115 Hegel discerns the very contradictions Lukács speaks of from humans’ initial attempt to satisfy their ‘natural needs’. All individuals have to satisfy these ‘natural needs’ if they are to continue existing. The initial forms these needs take are particular, but they gain some form of universality by satisfying the needs of others. However, as individuals interact with each other the conflict of master and servant arises. Contradictions abound, therefore, in the ‘system of needs’. Even the estates, which are meant to ensure greater contact with the universal, contain within them a new breed of dehumanised workers – dehumanised by the ‘system of needs’ itself. Hegel leaves us, therefore, with a feeling of unmediated contradictions. As Avineri rightly concludes, for Hegel, human beings become ‘enslaved’ by their own needs and ‘the modes of satisfying them’. 116 However, Avineri considers Hegel to be ‘quietistic’ in trying to overcome this problem.117 Yet Hegel is actually leaving it up to the Will, us, human beings, to defeat the very monster we have created. Even within this monstrous system, Hegel recognises that there are moments when human beings are satisfying their more ‘spiritual needs’.118 Labour itself, for instance, is immersed in necessity and external compulsion but still contains a ‘moment of liberation’ through its creative aspect. 119 Making such moments total and fully satisfying ‘spiritual needs’ is the task all individuals must accomplish.120 Hegel was, therefore, either a poor philosopher for leaving so many contradictions within his system, or he was trying to suggest something else with the contradictions he highlights. My contention is that Hegel is speculatively analysing the various forms in which the Will satisfies its needs and attempts to overcome any contradictions present. Consequently, human beings should be a master of, and not a slave to, the very world they have created by overcoming this monstrous community of need that imprisons them.


Marx’s Animated Monster The earlier discussion of Marx’s ‘egoistic needs’ gave a clear indication of the contradictions that arise from need satisfaction within capitalism. Marx shows how capitalism reduces individuals to a preoccupation with their own ‘egoistic needs’ and not the needs of others in society.121 Dragged into the capitalist production process in order to satisfy their ‘natural needs’ individuals create a system over which they have little control. Individuals relate to each other not as person to person, human to human, but merely as means to the end of satisfying their ‘egoistic needs’. In capitalism the labouring activity of individuals, instead of being the ‘free expression’ and ‘enjoyment of life’, simply becomes a ‘torture’, nothing more than ‘forced labour imposed . . . not through an inner necessity [innere nothwendige Noth] but through an external arbitrary need [äusserliche Zuffällige Noth]’.122 Labour may be the ‘living, form-giving fire’123 through which humans realise themselves, but it quickly becomes a deathly activity in capital. Through the pumping out of surplus-value the worker is turned into a ‘fragment of a man’, a mere ‘appendage of a machine’. 124 Wealth accumulates for capital, whereas for labour there is only the ‘accumulation of misery’.125 The absorption of a person’s labour-power into the animated monster of capital is the rule of dead labour over living labour. The mediation of the selling of labour-power results in a dead world that humans have themselves created. The initial need becomes lost as a person is made ‘subordinate’ to the ‘alien substance’ of money which is the very ‘estranged essence of [his] work and existence’. 126 Money acts as a ‘pimp between need and object, between life and man’s means of life’. 127 The object needed becomes secondary to the prior need for money. Consequently, money, and not the object, becomes the ‘real need’ of all individuals in the perverted realm of private property.128 As a dialectician, however, Marx is aware of the positive moments within the alienated system of capital. He notes how communism, or the ‘true community’, which is the ‘essence of man’, actually ‘arises out of the need and the egoism of individuals’.129 The ‘true community of man’ contains the ‘real, conscious and authentic existence’ of humans’ ‘species-activity’ and ‘species spirit’ through ‘social activity and social enjoyment’.130 As the realm of private property does not allow humans to recognise themselves as humans or ‘give the world a human organisation, this community appears in the form of estrangement [Form der Entfremdung]’.131

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So even in the alienated form of a system of private property, elements of the ‘true community’ are present. In the very satisfaction of ‘egoistic needs’ moments of ‘human need’ are also being satisfied but in an estranged form. To overcome this estrangement properly and fully establish a ‘true community’, ‘human need’ has to replace ‘egoistic need’ totally. Yet, moments of ‘human need’ exist within the alienated form of ‘egoistic need’. The mode of existence or determinate abstraction of ‘human need’ in capitalism is ‘egoistic need’.132 For Marx, then, slaying the monster of capital is the responsibility of its creators – the workers. The movement from the general abstraction of ‘natural needs’ to the forms needs take in capital results in mediations that dominate individuals. The ‘cruel nature-imposed necessity’ is that workers have to sell their labour-power to satisfy their ‘natural needs’. 133 In doing so capital takes on monstrous proportions, but the antagonistic presence of labour also indicates the potential for its downfall and the eventual creation of a ‘true community’ based on ‘human need’.

Conclusion Hegel and Marx follow a very similar path from need to the creation of a monster. ‘Natural needs’ – needs that are universally present in all societies and which humans must satisfy to subsist – are the universal concept and general abstraction for Hegel and Marx, respectively. They both analyse the forms this universal notion of need takes in society. For Hegel, the focus is on the Will, human beings, who have to satisfy their ‘natural needs’ in order to exist. The satisfaction of these ‘natural needs’ passes through various mediations: immediate satisfaction, labour, surplus and money. Similarly, Marx follows the form ‘natural needs’ take through the antagonistic presence of labour in capital. He too emphasises the mediation of need through the moments of labour, surplus and money. For both thinkers there is an initial mention of ‘drives’. For Hegel, such a drive manifests itself in the form of need, which is itself a feeling of separation. Humans have to overcome this feeling of separation to satisfy their ‘natural needs’ to live. For Hegel, humans must try to master these drives if they are to be free. For Marx, drives exist within humans as ‘vital powers’ which take the form of ‘natural needs’ that humans have to satisfy. Hegel and Marx then both emphasise the important mediation of labour to satisfy ‘natural needs’. Both grasp how labour leads to productive developments that can result in the creation of a surplus. They also realise that control over the surplus produced leads to exchange


and forms of domination that are rooted in humans’ needs. For Hegel, this domination is encapsulated in the master/servant relation. Needs are the persistent, reverberating presence in this process, culminating in the form of money as an ‘abstract sign’ of need and leading to ‘opinion’ – mere whim and fancy. At the very same time, however, Hegel also notes how a mass of people have to satisfy their ‘natural needs’ in a very rudimentary form. The poor remain outside any mediating institutions. Even worse, a section of the poor become a ‘rabble’ and their condition is a result of the very contradictions inherent in a system based on free exchange. The ‘system of needs’, therefore, contains deep antagonisms that cannot be mediated. The incipient presence of the working class – which Hegel grasps within the estates – suggests further rupture, not less. Even the institutions of the police and corporation find themselves ill-equipped to overcome such contradictions. For Marx, the workers pump out a surplus which the capitalist appropriates. Workers posit their needs as ‘necessary’ through the mediation of the wage. Marx emphasises the tendency for the production of severe inequalities through this pumping out of the surplus. Some people are reduced to satisfying their needs at a very rudimentary level. Others can actually satisfy their needs through the form of ‘luxury needs’, which may at times be the preserve of the capitalist class. For Marx, the contradiction between the needs of workers and the needs of capital is fought out on this terrain of need and labour. For Hegel and Marx, then, the various mediations that develop from the initial satisfaction of needs results in a monstrous system that seems to dominate individuals. By emphasising the antagonisms and contradictions within this process, however, they also suggest that we, the creators of such a monster, have it in our own hands to defeat the beast and constitute our needs free from subordination and strife.

Notes 1 G. W. F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, tr. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1979), p. 249. 2 K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, tr. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 342, 1007. 3 For a more detailed discussion, see I. Fraser, ‘Two of a Kind: Hegel, Marx, Dialectic and Form’, Capital and Class, 61 (1997). 4 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, tr. L. Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), p. 120; G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, 8: Jenaer Systementwürfe III, eds, R.-P. Horstman with J. Henrich Trede (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976), p. 224.

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5 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 105. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §45. Hereafter cited as Elements of the Philosophy of Right, with A = Addition and R = Remark. Hegel also uses the term ‘universal need’ in the same sense of ‘natural need’ clearly indicating their universal basis. See, Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §189A. 6 Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 120. Term in square brackets in the original translation. Werke, 8, p. 224. 7 K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in K. Marx, Early Writings, tr. R. Livingstone and G. Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 390; K. Marx and F. Engels, Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1982), I.2, p. 408. Within the ‘Manuscripts’ Marx uses the concept of ‘natural need’ only once, but its meaning recurs in other terms such as ‘bodily needs’ (Leibesbedürfnisse, or körperlichen Bedürfnisse), as in Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 290; Gesamstaugabe, I.2, p. 334; or ‘physical needs’ (physischen Bedürfnisses), as in Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 329; Gesamtausgabe, I.2, p. 369. 8 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 275. 9 The note states: ‘Hegel. Geological, hydrographical, etc., conditions. Human bodies. Needs, labour’. K. Marx, and F. Engels, The German Ideology, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), p. 42. Marx is referring to the section ‘Geographical Basis of History’ in G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956). 10 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 41–2. 11 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 42. Soper suggests that Marx contradicts himself here, because he also argues that the ‘creation of new needs’ is the ‘first historical act’. K. Soper, On Human Needs: Open and Closed Theories in a Marxist Perspective (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), p. 46; Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 42. However, as Marx himself points out only a few pages later, which Soper does not refer to, these ‘aspects’ of ‘social activity’ he has identified ‘are not to be taken as . . . different stages’. Instead Marx, in a Hegelian refrain, suggests that they should be understood as ‘“moments”, which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history’; Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 43. The production of means to satisfy needs and the creation of new needs exist simultaneously, and both, therefore, are ‘first historical acts’. For example, the project of sharpening a stone in order to cut meat more efficiently is both the production of the means to satisfy a need (for food or meat) and also the creation of a new need (for a sharp stone). Marx is therefore dialectically tracing the inner connections between the moments of need and their satisfaction. He is trying to avoid a static approach which demarcates needs into particular ‘stages’. Instead, Marx is emphasising the importance of understanding needs in their movement and transition within and between each other. Consequently, the production of means to satisfy needs and the creation of new needs coexist. This is why he can refer to them both as ‘first historical acts’. 12 K. Marx and F. Engels, The Poverty of Philosophy, Collected Works, 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), p. 117. 13 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 104; ‘System der Sittlichkeit’, p. 422.

Hegel and Marx on Needs 163 14 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §5; G. W. F. Hegel, Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), Vol. VII , p. 49. 15 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §6. 16 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §11 and §11R 17 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §11R. Werke, VII, p. 62. 18 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §17 and §17A. 19 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §17; Werke, VII, p. 68. 20 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §18A. 21 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §19. 22 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §11A. 23 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §21. 24 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §37. 25 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §182. 26 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §182. 27 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §185. 28 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §185. 29 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §189. 30 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 389. 31 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, pp. 389–90. 32 K. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, in K. Marx, Early Writings, p. 189; Gesamtausgabe, I.2, p. 129. 33 K. Marx, ‘Excerpts From James Mill’, in Early Writings, p. 269; Gesamtausgabe, IV.2, p. 455. 34 Marx, ‘James Mill’, p. 269; Gesamtausgabe, IV.2, p. 455. 35 Marx, ‘James Mill’, p. 269; Gesamtausgabe, IV.2, p. 455. 36 Marx, ‘James Mill’, p. 269; Gesamtausgabe, IV.2, p. 455. 37 K. Marx, On the Jewish Question, Early Writings, p. 230. 38 Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 230. See also, K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family: Or Critique of Critical Critique, Collected Works, Vol. 4 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), p. 113. 39 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 106. 40 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §189A. 41 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §182. 42 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §189. 43 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 117. 44 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 117. 45 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 118. 46 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 124. 47 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 124. 48 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 125. 49 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 125. 50 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 126. Term in square brackets in the original translation; ‘System der Sittlichkeit’, p. 447. 51 Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 126. 52 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), §67 and §67R; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 272, n. Cf. D. MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx (London & Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 163–4. 53 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 274.

164 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

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87 88

Ian Fraser Marx, ‘James Mill’, p. 269. K. Marx, Grundrisse, tr. M. Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973), p. 527. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 807. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§190, 190A, 192. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§190A, 191, 192; Werke, VII, p. 349. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §191. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §191A. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §190A. M. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 48. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §190A. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §190A. Marx & Engels, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 133. K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 2, tr. D. Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 486. A. Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (London: Allison & Busby), p. 37. Marx & Engels, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 132. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§238 and 238A. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §241. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §241. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §242. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §243. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §243; Werke, VII, p. 389. Translation modified. I follow Knox here in translating ‘Not’ as ‘distress’ rather than ‘want’ as Nisbet does. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §243. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §235. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §235. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §236R, 236 and 236A. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §251. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§252 and 253. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §254A. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §255. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §255. Harris and Knox do this throughout their translation of the ‘System der Sittlichkeit’. For greater accuracy I will use the term ‘estate’ for ‘Stand’ and ‘class’ for ‘Klasse’. A. W. Wood, ‘Hegel and Marxism’, in F. C. Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 423. Avineri is therefore wrong to say that ‘for Hegel, classes always remain estates’. S. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 105. G. Poggi, The State. Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 40–1. For a more detailed examination of the concept of ‘Stand’, see G. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (London: Hutchinson), 1978, pp. 42–51. Wood, ‘Hegel and Marxism’, p. 423. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, IV, p. 63 as quoted by Wood, ‘Hegel and Marxism’, p. 423.

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94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, p. 109. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, p. 109. Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 171; ‘System der Sittlichkeit’, p. 496. Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 171. Harris, ‘Hegel’s System of Ethical Life’, p. 75. For a less sympathetic account, see G. Lukács, The Young Hegel. Studies in the Relation Between Dialectics and Economics (London: Merlin, 1975), p. 332. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 166; Gesammelte Werke, 8, p. 270. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 166; Gesammelte Werke, 8, p. 270. Lukács, himself, is forced to admit Hegel’s ‘incredible’ ‘insight’ here. Lukács, The Young Hegel, p. 331. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §204. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §244. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §244. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §244. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §244A. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §244A. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §244A. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §244A; Werke, VII, p. 390. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §244. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §245. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §245. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §245. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §246. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§247 and 248. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §248A. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §256. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §341. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §33A. Hegel, System of Ethical Life, p. 249. Lukács, The Young Hegel, p. 332. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, p. 98. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, p. 99. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §194. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §194R. For the role of technology in this process, see I. Fraser, ‘Beyond Prometheus: Hegel on the Need to be Free’, Politics, 15, 2 (1995), pp. 97–103. Marx, ‘James Mill’, p. 269. Marx, ‘James Mill’, p. 278. Gesamtausgabe, IV.2, p. 466. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 361. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 799. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 799. Marx, On the Jewish Question, pp. 241 and 239. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 375. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 358. Marx, ‘James Mill’, p. 265. Marx, ‘James Mill’, p. 265. Marx, ‘James Mill’, p. 265; Gesamtausgabe, IV.2, p. 452. Translation modified.

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132 W. Leiss, ‘Marx and Macpherson: Needs., Utilities and Self-Development’, in A. Kantos, ed., Powers, Possessions and Freedom (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 121–2, is wrong to suggest, therefore, that Marx’s early writings are ‘a one-sided attack on capitalist society, asserting that it denies all “human needs”’. For a more accurate account of how ‘human need’ is present within ‘egoistic need’, see A. Chitty, ‘The Early Marx on Needs’, Radical Philosophy, 64 (1993), p. 29. However, Chitty does not account for Marx’s notion of ‘natural needs’ which, as we saw earlier, appear mostly in the early writings as ‘physical’ or ‘bodily’ needs. Consequently, the inner connection between ‘egoistic’, ‘human’ and ‘natural’ need remains unexplored. 133 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 277.

8 Recognition and Social Relations of Production Andrew Chitty

‘Social relation of production’ is a key term in Marx’s theory of history, for the social relations of production of a society give that society its fundamental character and make it, for example, a capitalist rather than some other kind of society.1 In Marx’s words: The social relations within which [humans] produce, the social relations of production [gesellschaftliche Produktionsverhältnisse] . . . in their totality form what are called social relations, society, and specifically a society at a determinate historical stage of development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois society are such totalities of relations of production, each of which at the same time denotes a special stage of development in the history of mankind.2 For Marx the major institutions of a historical epoch – specifically its legal and political systems – are deeply conditioned by its social relations of production. In his metaphor from the 1859 Preface, the social relations of production form a ‘base’ and these institutions a ‘superstructure’ which arises out of it. 3 Accordingly, his general strategy for explaining these institutions is to show how the relations of production give rise to them. The base is explanans and the superstructure is explanandum, and to say that some aspect of social life belongs to the base or the superstructure is simply to say what its role is in this conditioning process, and so in Marx’s explanation of social institutions. However Marx never says in so many words just what social relations of production are, and the concept has been strongly criticised by nonMarxists. In some places he appears to equate them with property relations: in Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality he states that ‘private 167

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property . . . consists in the totality of the bourgeois relations of production’,4 and in the 1859 Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he says that property relations are ‘only a legal expression for’ relations of production. 5 Yet if property relations are legal relations – and this is the most obvious way to understand them – then they cannot be identical with social relations of production, for the legal system is meant to be part of the superstructure of society, the character of which is explained by the relations of production. Legal property relations would have to make up the base and yet also belong to the superstructure. This difficulty has been called the ‘problem of legality’. 6 Problems like it have given rise to the criticism that the very idea of ‘social relations of production’ in Marx is incoherent, or as Plamenatz put it, that it is ‘a phrase used not to express thought but to cover up its absence, and is therefore not to be rendered into meaningful English’.7 In this essay I shall try to understand the idea of social relations of production as a development of the account of right (Recht) given by two of Marx’s immediate philosophical predecessors, Fichte and Hegel. I begin by elucidating Fichte’s account of the ‘relation of right’ (Rechtsverhältnis) as a relation of mutual recognition between self-conscious subjects through which they mutually constitute each other as selfconscious. I then show how Hegel’s account of right can be understood in terms of a plurality of such relations of mutual recognition. Finally, I outline an interpretation of Marx’s notion of social relations of production as a transformation of this idea of relations of recognition. I suggest that this can explain in what sense relations of production are, and are not, property relations.

Fichte’s Account of Recht The German Recht is sometimes translated as ‘law’ or ‘justice’, but I shall translate it by the generic word ‘right’. Broadly, Recht is the generic equivalent of ein Recht, a right. It is that which unites, is common to or underlies all particular rights and the laws that enforce those rights and their correlative duties. So in translating it by the English word ‘right’ we need to keep in mind the usage of that word in which it is specifically tied to the idea of rights. Fichte, in his 1796 Grundlage des Naturrechts (Foundation of Natural Right), attempts to give a philosophical account of right by relating it closely to the kind of beings that we are: specifically, beings that are selfconscious. His account takes the form of a ‘transcendental deduction’ of the concept of right from that of self-consciousness: that is, an argument

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to show that a being can only be self-conscious if it acts in accordance with right. The argument provides at once a philosophical account of right (a statement of what right essentially consists in) and a philosophical justification of it (an explanation of why it must be the case that people act in accord with it). Very roughly, the argument is that an individual can be self-conscious only if it thinks of itself as one selfconscious being amongst others, and it can think of itself in this way only if the individuals concerned think of, and treat, each other as free. Now right, according to Fichte consists fundamentally in this relation of mutually thinking of and treating each other as free, as well as in what necessarily follows from it, namely in his view private property and the other legal institutions that he goes on to derive in the book. Fichte describes both the act of thinking of another as free, and the act of treating another as free that expresses such thinking, as ‘recognition’ (Anerkennung).8 I shall distinguish his two senses of the word by using ‘cognitive recognition’ for the first and ‘practical recognition’ for the second. It is important to notice that both cognitive and practical recognition involve the thought of the other’s freedom as ‘to be respected’. As a result, they are both normative ideas, in contrast to the ideas of, for example, recognising a banknote as Swiss or recognising the law of gravity, which imply no such respect and are not normative.9 Using this terminology, we can then say that for Fichte right consists fundamentally in the relation of mutual cognitive and practical recognition between self-conscious beings, and in the further kinds of thinking and action that follow from this relation. In fact he calls this relation of mutual recognition the ‘relation of right’: The deduced relation between rational beings – namely one in which each individual restricts its freedom through the concept of the possibility of the freedom of the other, under the condition that the other simultaneously restricts its own through that of the first, is called the relation of right [Rechtsverhältnis], and its formula, stated here, is the principle of right [Rechtsatz].10 An awkward result of Fichte’s argument for the necesssity of the relation of right to self-consciousness is that it seems to make it literally impossible for one self-conscious being to infringe the freedom of another. I shall not look into this or other difficulties with the argument. Instead I want to draw out two points from Fichte’s account. The first is that his relation of right is an ‘interactional relation’, that is, one that consists in two (or more) individuals thinking of and acting

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towards each other in complementary ways over some period of time. 11 I shall argue below that Hegel’s relations of recognition and Marx’s relations of production are also interactional relations. The second is that the argument for the relation of mutual cognitive and practical recognition implies that this relation is partially ‘interconstitutive’ of self-consciousness. That is, any self-conscious being is constituted as self-conscious only through engaging in this relation with others while these other self-conscious beings are in turn constituted as self-conscious only by engaging in the same relation, although of course there is more to self-consciousness than just engaging in this relation. It follows that self-consciousness is only possible as a feature of members of a group of mutually recognising beings. In so far as self-consciousness is an essential characteristic of being human, the same goes for humanity: humanity can only exist ‘in the plural’. Fichte draws this conclusion explicitly: A human (like any finite being)12 becomes a human only among humans; and since he cannot be anything else but a human and would not be at all unless he were this, if humans are to be at all, there must be many of them. This is not an arbitrary assumption, or an opinion based on past experience or on other reasons of probability. It is a truth to be proved strictly from the concept of a human. As soon as one determines this concept fully, one is driven from thinking a single [human] to the assumption of a second, in order to be able to explain the first. Hence the concept of human is not at all the concept of a single one, for such a one is unthinkable, but of a species [Gattung].13 It would not be far-fetched to say that in this passage Fichte anticipates Feuerbach’s and the early Marx’s accounts of humans as speciesbeings (Gattungswesen).

Hegel’s Argument In this and the following sections I shall argue that Hegel, in the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Mind and the Philosophy of Right, takes up but also transforms Fichte’s account of the connection between self-consciousness and right, and his conception of relations of mutual recognition as interconstitutive. Hegel’s dialectical derivation of right from ‘consciousness’ in the Philosophy of Mind provides both an account and a justification of right, just as Fichte’s deduction of right does. Hegel’s argument leads from


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‘consciousness’ to ‘self-consciousness’, to ‘desire’, to ‘particular or related self-consciousness’, to ‘mastery and servitude’, to ‘universal selfconsciousness’, to ‘intelligence’, to ‘will’ and finally to ‘right’, so that its starting and finishing points are similar to Fichte’s, although Hegel’s ‘consciousness’ is not quite the same as Fichte’s ‘self-consciousness’, and Hegel does not simply begin with consciousness but derives this in turn from soul, animal, plant, and so on, back through the Encyclopaedia.14 Furthermore, each of the main stages in Hegel’s argument corresponds to a stage in Fichte’s.15 However, there is a fundamental difference in the form of the argument. Whereas Fichte’s argument is transcendental, and proceeds from self-consciousness by successively uncovering the necessary conditions for its existence, Hegel’s argument is dialectical and phenomenological, by which I mean that it works in the following way. It understands consciousness, self-consciousness, and so on as distinct ‘forms of subjectivity’ (my own term), that is, as distinct basic ways in which a subject conceives itself and the main elements of its world and which constitute it as one kind of subject or another. For each of these, the argument shows how a contradiction internal to the form of subjectivity forces the subject to conceive itself and the elements of its world in a new way, that is, to transform its form of subjectivity into a new one. Thus the argument begins by defining ‘consciousness’ as that elementary form of subjectivity in which the subject conceives of itself merely in contradistinction to independent objects outside it. The argument then shows how a contradiction internal to consciousness forces the conscious subject to transform its form of subjectivity into ‘self-consciousness’, in which the subject conceives itself not just as counterposed to objects outside it, but also as an object, and conversely conceives other objects as somehow imbued with subjectivity. In turn, self-consciousness as a form of subjectivity suffers from an analogous contradiction, so that the subject is forced to change its form of subjectivity again, to ‘particular self-consciousness’, a collective form of subjectivity consisting in each of two subjects attributing self-consciousness both to itself and to the other. Particular self-consciousness has to give way to the next form of subjectivity, and so on. The argument is ‘dialectical’ in that it proceeds by uncovering and resolving contradictions, but also ‘phenomenological’ in that it re-enacts the process through which a conscious subject is forced successively to reconstitute itself in the light of its discovery of these contradictions. This means that for Hegel, unlike Fichte, right is not a necessary condition of consciousness. His argument is rather only that a conscious

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subject, in so far as it successively becomes aware of and resolves the contradictions inherent in its forms of subjectivity, must eventually be driven to establish with others the form of subjectivity called right. For Hegel, that faculty in me that makes me become aware of contradictions and try to resolve them is my rationality, so if I as a conscious being fail to establish relations of right with others, this is a failure of rationality on my part, but such a failure of rationality does not mean that I am not conscious.

From Particular to Universal Self-consciousness To understand Hegel’s account of right, it will be necessary to trace the part of his argument that runs from ‘particular self-consciousness’ via ‘universal self-consciousness’ through to ‘right’ itself.16 In particular (or related) self-consciousness, each of two subjects sees both itself and the other as an object which is self-conscious and so free, so that each conceives the other as ‘another I’. The subject, says Hegel, ‘counterposes itself as a distinct I to itself’.17 As a result, in confronting this other, ‘I see in it, as an I, me myself, but also an immediately existing other object as an absolute I opposite me’. 18 This form of subjectivity is contradictory, for on the one hand the first subject conceives the second as a self-related (because self-conscious) physical entity outside it, and yet on the other hand it sees the other not just as ‘another being just like me’, but as quite literally itself, as ‘I’. It sees at the same time two distinct subjects and a single subject: at once difference and identity. According to Hegel, this contradiction can only be overcome, for each subject, through that subject displaying itself as free to the other, and being recognised by the other as free: ‘This contradiction gives the drive to show oneself as a free self and to exist [da zu sein] as such for the other – the process of recognition [Anerkennung].’19 Since it was part of the definition of particular self-consciousness that each subject sees the other as free, Hegel must be distinguishing recognition from simply seeing the other as free. So presumably, like Fichte, he conceives recognition, whether cognitive or practical, as involving a conception of the freedom of the other as to be respected. His argument then appears to be as follows. If the other cognitively recognises me as free, then it in some way identifies with me as a decision-maker, for in thinking of my freedom as to be respected it conceives my decisions as somehow to be deferred to, and therefore as partly authoritative over its actions – in just the same way as I think of my decisions as authoritative


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over my own actions. Hegel expresses this identification by saying that when I am recognised by another then I have given myself an existence (Dasein) in the ‘ground’ or ‘soil’ (Boden) of the other’s consciousness. 20 When the other expresses this cognitive recognition practically, the practical recognition will provide me with the proof of the cognitive recognition behind it. Only then will I be able to reconcile my sense that the other is both distinct from and identical to myself, for I will then be able to conceive the other as distinct from me in that it is a selfconscious physical being outside me, yet as identical to me in that it shows through its actions that it somehow conceives itself as identical with me as a decision-maker. So in order to resolve the contradiction of particular self-consciousness I must be cognitively and practically recognised as free by the other. Of course, this is a demand that each of the subjects must make of the other. But these two demands are incompatible, because Hegel claims that at the stage of particular self-consciousness subjects have an individualistic conception of freedom. That is, in their eyes to be free means to be, as an individual, a completely self-originating source of decisions and actions. They do not yet have a sense of freedom as a single autonomous decision-making activity shared by a plurality of self-conscious beings. From this individualistic point of view, for me to recognise the other as free (to respect the other as free in my thinking and action) means for me to take the other’s arbitrary individual decisions as partly authoritative over my own actions, and to act accordingly. But to do this would be partly to lose my own freedom, again in the individualistic sense of the complete self-origination of my own decisions and actions. In fact it would be to lose my freedom completely, for Hegel assumes that freedom is an all-or-nothing affair, in the sense that to be unfree in any of one’s actions is to be completely unfree. It follows that I cannot recognise the other as at all free without becoming completely unfree in my own eyes. Therefore, while I must demand that the other (cognitively and practically) recognise me as free, I must refuse to recognise the other as free at all. Furthermore, I must demand that the other become completely unfree in its own eyes in order that it be able to recognise me, and thus take my decisions as not just partly but absolutely authoritative over its actions. I must demand a recognition that has an ‘absolute’ or ‘self-surrendering’ character: one in which the other identifies not just ‘in some way’, but absolutely with me as decisionmaker, seeing itself as nothing but an agent of my decision-making. By the same reasoning, the other must demand the same absolute recognition from me. 21

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The result is the well-known ‘struggle for recognition’ and its resolution one way or the other in a master–servant relation. This relation can best be described by introducing the term ‘assertion’ to mean the same thing as ‘recognition’, but referred to oneself rather than to another, so that to assert oneself cognitively as free is to see oneself as free and to think of that freedom as to be respected, and to assert oneself practically as free is to act accordingly. The master–servant relation is then an interactional relation consisting in one-sided recognition combined with one-sided assertion. In it, both cognitively and practically, one subject (the servant) recognises a second as free and does not assert itself as free, while the second subject (the master) asserts itself as free and does not recognise the first as free. The relation is ‘fully interconstitutive’ of mastery and servitude, in that simply by engaging in it they constitute themselves respectively as servant and master: being a master or servant, in the special meanings that Hegel gives to these terms, consists in nothing but engaging in this relation. As a result of the all-or-nothing character of freedom, the recognition and the assertion in question are absolute. So the servant’s cognitive recognition and the master’s cognitive assertion both take the form of taking the master’s arbitrary decisions to be absolutely authoritative over the servant’s actions. The servant’s practical recognition then takes the form of obeying the master unconditionally, while the master’s practical assertion takes the form of giving the servant orders at will. Because of the dual cognitive and practical character of Hegel’s recognition and its correlative assertion, mastery and servitude are a form of subjectivity that is not only collective but also practical, for it consists in two subjects not only conceiving but also acting towards each other in a certain way. But this form of subjectivity in turn fails to resolve the contradiction of particular self-consciousness, even for the master who has won the struggle for recognition. The master aimed to resolve the contradiction through the servant somehow identifying itself with the master as a decision-maker, since in so doing the servant would become, in a sense, identical with but at the same time distinct from the master. In fact the all-or-nothing character of freedom forced the master to demand more from the servant: an absolute identification with the master as decision-maker. The servant’s unconditional obedience would give the master the assurance that this identification had taken place. But in the process of bringing about this identification, the servant has surrendered its authority over its own decisions and the master has not. This means that the master now sees in the servant a being of a quite different kind to itself. Thus the servant’s recognition of


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the master fails after all to enable the master to think of the servant as identical to itself.22 The master–servant relation cannot solve the contradiction of particular self-consciousness because of its asymmetry. It must therefore give way to an interactional relation consisting in mutual recognition and assertion, in which each of two (or more) self-conscious subjects cognitively and practically recognises the other, and asserts itself, as free. In such a relation each ‘knows itself recognised in the free other, and knows this, in so far as it recognises the other and knows it as free’. 23 This relation forms a new collective and practical form of subjectivity, which Hegel names ‘universal self-consciousness’. The relation is fully interconstitutive of universal self-consciousness, in that by engaging in it individuals constitute each other as universally self-conscious beings. It is made possible by their giving up the individualistic conception of freedom mentioned above, one in which freedom consists in the individual’s self-origination of its own actions. Instead freedom is now thought of as something like ‘acting with others’, or the collective selforigination of action. Here to be free is to be the representative and agent of a single decision-making activity, one which is no longer identified with the arbitrary decisions of any one individual, as in the case of the master–servant relation, but which is universal or common to all. This single free decision-making activity is something like Rousseau’s general will, although Hegel reserves the actual term ‘will’ for its successor, discussed below. Given such a conception of freedom, each can recognise the other as free, in the ‘absolute’ sense of recognition described above, without ceasing to think of itself as free. In recognising the other as free, and being recognised as free by the other, each identifies with the other as decision-maker, and knows that the other identifies similarly with it, and since the decision-making in question is a free decision-making that is common to all of them this does not lead to the division of statuses that characterised the master–servant relation. In recognising each other as free, they do not simply think of each other as having the same property of being free, any more than in particular self-consciousness they simply thought of themselves as sharing the common property of being self-conscious. Rather they think of themselves as representatives of a single ‘freedom’: a single free decisionmaking activity. Thereby they experience themselves as identical, as literally a single I: the self-conscious subjects related to each other have through the supersession of their dissimilar particular singularity risen to the

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consciousness of their real universality, of their freedom which belongs to all, and thereby to the intuition of their determinate identity with each other.24 Yet while as representatives of a single ‘freedom’ they experience themselves as a single ‘I’, still as separate self-conscious physical entities they continue to experience themselves as distinct ‘I’s (thus as a ‘we’). Just as in particular self-consciousness, they simultaneously experience themselves as identical and different, a double experience captured in the phrase ‘universal self-consciousness’ happened, but this identity now takes a form in which it no longer contradicts their difference. Universal self-consciousness therefore finally resolves the contradiction of particular self-consciousness. The ‘universal reflecting’25 of mutual recognition and assertion in universal self-consciousness not only involves individuals thinking of and treating each other as possessing a common freedom. It also, Hegel implies, constitutes them as actual possessors of such a freedom. Likewise it not only produces a sense on the part of the individuals that engage in it of themselves as a single I. It also actually constitutes them as a members of a common ‘substance’,26 a substance that is at once unitary and plural because it is constituted by nothing but the relations of mutual assertion and recognition between its own members. This substance is the immediate precursor of Hegel’s mature concept of ‘spirit’; and the common freedom its members possess, which we could now call ‘substantial freedom’, immediately anticipates the freedom that for him is the essential property of spirit.

From Spirit to Right In universal self-consciousness a plurality of individuals see themselves as representatives of a single ‘freedom’ and thus as identical to each other. So one individual confronting another conceives itself as at root identical to an object outside itself. According to Hegel, such individuals will generalise this attitude to the object from the special case where the object is another self-conscious being to the general case of the objective world as such. The resulting perception of oneself as at root identical with the objective world outside one is what Hegel calls ‘reason’, and in so far as a community of individuals possess it they become ‘spirit’ (or ‘mind’).27 In that they see themselves as everywhere related only to that which is at root identical to them, they see themselves as self-determining or free with regard not only to each other but


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also to the objective world, and thereby, according to Hegel, for the first time they become properly free. 28 So at this point the substantial freedom constituted by mutual recognition and assertion becomes true freedom, the freedom of which Hegel can say that ‘freedom is the one authentic property of spirit’.29 Yet spirit in turn suffers from a contradiction. On the one hand, ‘it is confident that in the world it will find its own self’. 30 Yet on the other, the objective world still appears as physically other to and distinct from it. Although Hegel does not spell it out, more specifically the contradiction seems to be that the universal freedom constituted by the general relation of mutual recognition and assertion lacks any determinacy, since to speak simply of ‘mutual recognition and assertion as free’ is not yet to say anything about what determinate kinds of thinking and action this involves, whereas by contrast the objective world is an extensively determinate one. In order to overcome this contradiction individuals are driven to make the identity between themselves and the world explicit by progressively ‘evaporating’ the determinate detail of the objective world, and discovering a universality inherent in it which will be identical to the universality of their own freedom. This universality is that of the regularities of nature. Hegel calls the effort to discover it ‘intelligence’, or ‘theoretical spirit’. Yet even when successful, this effort to discover universality in nature does not overcome the tension between the indeterminacy of universal freedom and the determinacy of the objective world. So individuals are in turn driven to overcome the difference by progressively realising that freedom in the world, by giving it a determinate objective existence there. Hegel calls this effort ‘will’, or ‘practical spirit’, and the freedom that they attempt to realise the ‘free substantial will’, the free will of their substance. 31 Accordingly, objectifying freedom, giving it a determinate existence (Dasein), will consist in elaborating specific relations of mutual recognition and assertion which will give a determinate content to the bare idea of ‘mutual recognition and assertion as free’. These interactional relations will take the form of shared practices and social institutions, sustaining which will then be the means whereby individuals objectify and so realise their own freedom. In the Philosophy of Right Hegel successively derives the various practices and institutions that he thinks can objectify this freedom, through the same process of discovering and overcoming contradictions that has led him up to this point. Their totality, the objectification of freedom or the free will as a whole, is what he calls ‘objective spirit’ or ‘right’:

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[T]he existence [Dasein] of the free will is right, which is to be taken comprehensively, not just as limited juristic right, but as the existence of all the determinations of freedom.32 Or as he also puts it: The system of right is the realm of actualised freedom, the world of spirit brought forth from itself, as a second nature. 33 We can therefore summarise Hegel’s account of right as follows: right consists in that set of specific relations of (cognitive and practical) recognition and assertion which is required in order to resolve the contradiction of spirit, by giving a determinate content to the bare idea of ‘mutual recognition and assertion as free’ and thereby giving an objectivity to the substantial freedom that individuals constitute through such recognition and assertion. We can call each of these specific relations a ‘form of right’. Their most general principle is that of asserting one’s own freedom, and recognising that of others, in all its aspects. So whenever one individual claims a particular kind of right and another respects it, at root the first is simply asserting, and the second simply recognising, a particular aspect (or ‘determination’) of their substantial freedom. Thus in the case of the first form of right, which Hegel calls ‘abstract right’, the principle of right is ‘be a person and respect others as persons’.34 Being a person turns out to mean claiming property rights over some piece of nature, while respecting others as persons means respecting the corresponding claims of others, specifically through contract. In turn, this claiming and respecting is the way in which individuals respectively assert and recognise, and thereby objectify, the most elementary or ‘immediate’35 aspect of their freedom. Similarly each of the further forms and sub-forms of right described in the Philosophy of Right – morality, the family, civil society, and so on – should be understood as consisting essentially in a specific relation of mutual recognition and assertion as free between individuals, which is required, according to Hegel, in order to objectify a specific aspect of their substantial freedom. Together, he claims, they objectify that freedom as a whole. 36 We said that for Fichte right essentially consists in a relation of mutual cognitive and practical recognition as free. If what I have said so far is correct, then Hegel’s analysis of right is similar. The difference is that for him right consists in a relation of assertion as well as recognition, and in fact in a series of such relations. Furthermore, in Hegel these specific


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relations are the means of objectifying a substantial freedom which is constituted through ‘mutual recognition and assertion as free’ as such. Despite these differences, Hegel’s specific relations of recognition and assertion are, like Fichte’s relation of recognition, interconstitutive. Each relation of recognition and assertion is a collective and practical form of subjectivity, consisting in a number of different subjects both conceiving and acting towards each other in a certain way, and thereby constituting each other as a certain kind of subject: as a person, a moral subject, a family member, a bourgeois (a member of civil society), a citizen and so on. So the relations are fully interconstitutive of personhood, moral subjectivity and the rest: In right [that is, abstract right] the object is the person, in the moral standpoint the subject [that is the moral subject], in the family the family-member, in civil society in general the burgher (as bourgeois).37 At the same time personhood, moral subjectivity and the rest are only single aspects of objective freedom, so the totality of the specific relations of recognition and assertion is fully interconstitutive of objective freedom as a whole, just as Fichte’s relation of recognition is (partially) interconstitutive of self-consciousness. Individuals constitute each other as objectively free by engaging in the totality of the relations of recognition and assertion that make up right. However, where Hegel goes decisively beyond Fichte is in historicising his account of right. In the Philosophy of Mind and the Philosophy of Right he derives, from the idea of substantial freedom as such, a set of basic forms of right, an ‘outline of natural right’ as he calls it in the subtitle of the latter book. This turns out to approximate to a description of the actual social and political institutions of post-French Revolutionary Europe. But in the Philosophy of History he attempts to describe historical sets of social and political institutions as earlier, less adequate attempts to objectify spirit and the substantial freedom that is essential to it. Thus there were earlier forms of property, morality, the family, civil society and the political state. So we can speak not only of the system of ‘natural’ or ‘true’ forms of right described in the Philosophy of Right but also of an ancient Oriental set of forms of right, making up what Hegel calls the ‘Oriental state’ or the ‘Oriental world’, and similarly for the ancient Greek world, the Roman world and the ‘German’ (i.e. medieval and modern Christian) world. Each of these historical systems of right, on the interpretation proposed here, consists in a system of interactional relations: relations

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of mutual recognition and assertion. Each system is organised around some aspect of freedom and of spirit that it realises best, the ‘spirit of a people’ (Volksgeist) that animates the system, and accordingly in each of them one particular form of right dominates and colours the rest. Oriental right is dominated by the family, Roman right by property, and so on. Although they are all inherently restrictive in some way and so do not realise substantial freedom in full, they all realise it in part. Even the first and most despotic system of right, the Oriental world, where only the emperor is thought of as properly free, is still in some way a system of right: a partial realisation of spirit. So the emperor is free as the unique embodiment of the substantial freedom constituted through a system of mutual assertion and recognition. By contrast in the master–servant relation, which in its pure form can only have existed in a pre-historical period prior to the foundation of states, there is recognition and assertion but no such system of mutuality, and the master has no genuine freedom. Furthermore, we can think of each of the historical relations of mutual recognition and assertion as interconstitutive of the identities of the individuals that engage in it, just as those of the Philosophy of Right are. Emperor and subject, citizen and slave, are constituted as such by the relations of mutual recognition and assertion between them and the rest of their society. In short, the Philosophy of Right provides the key to Hegel’s philosophy of history. The different historical ‘worlds’ described in the latter are systems of right which are partial realisations of substantial freedom. Because each is only a partial realisation, it is eventually felt by the people that sustain it as restrictive, and has to give way to a system that realises freedom more adequately. The resulting succession ends only with the emergence of a system of right that fully embodies substantial freedom, and this is the system set out, according to Hegel, in the Philosophy of Right. So that system is in effect the ideal towards which the successive historical systems of right move. The movement is a teleological one, even though none of the actors in history has a conception in advance of the final point towards which they are all moving.

Humanity and Social Relations of Production In Hegel’s mature system, and even more so in his Phenomenology of Spirit, relations of recognition and assertion are often bound up with ‘economic’ relations: interactional relations of producing, transferring and acquiring goods capable of satisfying human needs. Specifically, Hegel frequently portrays an economic relation as the form that a


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relation of practical recognition and assertion takes. To take two examples: the master–servant relation is a relation of recognition and assertion whose practical aspect takes the form of the servant not just obeying, but working for the master, producing material goods to satisfy the master’s desires; and abstract right is a mutual relation of recognition and assertion of individuals as persons whose practical aspect takes the form of individuals possessing, working on and contracting to sell material goods to each other. In this and the next sections I outline how we can see Marx as ‘inverting’ Hegel by giving such economic relations, under the heading of ‘social relations of production’, the central place in his account of history that Hegel gives to relations of recognition and assertion, while relegating relations of cognitive and practical recognition to a closely related but derivative position. I begin by looking at Marx’s early concept of ‘humanity’ and the social ideal associated with it, for it is in articulating his idea of the human that he first uses the term ‘social relation’. In his 1844 writings Marx conceives humans in their essence as ‘species-beings’, that is, beings who are constituted as the kind of being that they are by virtue of creating products to satisfy the needs of, and satisfying their own needs with the products of, other beings of the same kind.38 The activity of creating, exchanging and enjoying such products (with the emphasis on the first two) is therefore fully interconstitutive of the human essence. In the Notes on James Mill Marx calls this activity as a whole ‘species activity’: The exchange, both of human activity within production itself and also of human products with each other, equals species-activity and species-spirit, whose actual, conscious and true existence [Dasein] is social activity and social enjoyment.39 By ‘exchange’ (Austausch), Marx here means the interchange of human products and activities in general, rather than specifically the conditional exchange of privately owned products in the market. Elsewhere he describes this collective activity as ‘the social relation’ (das gesellschaftliche Verhältnis).40 In The Holy Family, speaking of the product, he and Engels say that: the object, as being for man, as the objective being of man, is at the same time the existence [Dasein] of man for the other man, his human relation [Beziehung] to the other man, the social relating [das gesellschaftliche Verhalten] of man to man.41

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The close association between ‘relation’, ‘activity’ and ‘relating’ in these passages make it clear that the social relation Marx has in mind is an interactional one.42 Through engaging in it individuals constitute each other as possessors of the human essence, so that the terms ‘social’ and ‘human’ are effectively equivalent, and in passages from this period Marx often treats them as such. 43 However, in a society of private property, this activity or relation has an ‘alienated’ form, and so is not a genuinely social relation and does not constitute individuals as properly human. 44 In a well-known passage at the end of the Notes on James Mill, Marx describes the ideal form of this activity: the form in which it would be properly social (would be what he calls in this period ‘socialism’), and would properly constitute its participants as human. If we had produced as humans, he says, . . . (2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment, both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need in my work, and thus having objectified human nature, and of having thereby created an object corresponding to the need of another human essence. (3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and would therefore have been known and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essence, and as a necessary part of yourself . . . 45 What distinguishes such genuinely social production and enjoyment from this activity as it has existed until now is that it is uncoerced. In it, individuals do not produce and consume in ways that are somehow imposed on them from outside, but instead in ways that freely express their own needs for activity and enjoyment, needs which are ultimately expressions of their own urge to realise themselves as fully human beings. Such uncoerced mutual production and enjoyment, I suggest, is Marx’s ‘materialist’ version of the relation of mutual recognition and assertion as free that underlies the Philosophy of Right – ‘materialist’ in that it is based on production, and the early Marx tends to assume that all production is the production of material objects. Just as for Hegel individuals objectify freedom, and constitute each other as objectively free, by mutually asserting themselves to each other and recognising each other as free, so for Marx individuals realise humanity, and constitute each other as fully human beings, by mutually enjoying each other’s products and producing for each other’s needs.


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Furthermore, just as Hegel understood historical systems of right as inadequate attempts to do what the system of right in the Philosophy of Right does, namely objectify freedom in all its determinations, so in the same way Marx could now understand historical systems of production as inadequate attempts to do what the production described in the passage from the Notes on James Mill finally does, namely genuinely realise humanity. Thinking in this vein, we could suggest that Marx’s idea of ‘social relations’, ‘relations of production’ or ‘social relations of production’, as formulated in The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy, is conceived as just such an historical precursor to the genuinely social form of mutual production and enjoyment described in the Notes on James Mill, making it analogous to the idea of a set of historical relations of recognition and assertion that I have attributed to Hegel. Just as Hegel’s historical relations of recognition and assertion consist in more or less adequate approximations to relations of genuine mutual recognition and assertion, so Marx’s social relations of production would consist in more or less adequate approximations to the uncoerced relations of producing-for and using-the-product-of sketched in the Notes on James Mill. Such relations would be interactional and interconstitutive of humanity, but by engaging in different social relations of production individuals would constitute each other as human in more or less adequate ways. Unfortunately, this way of seeing social relations of production runs up against the problem that in The German Ideology, which develops the theory of history in which the concept plays a central part, Marx and Engels appear to reject the ideal of a realised humanity which had informed the 1844 writings, and see the idea of ‘the human’ or ‘the human essence’ as itself nothing but a philosophical expression of prevailing social relations. To sidestep this problem, we can reformulate the suggestion above as follows: social relations of production should be understood as relations that are interconstitutive of humans as the kind of humans that they are in any given society. 46 This much can be said without claiming either that there is or is not such a thing as a genuine humanity which is constituted by genuinely social relationships in communist society. Furthermore, even if there is no such thing, with this suggestion the equation of ‘human’ and ‘social’ remains. For as Marx says in the quote with which we began, the relations of production ‘in their totality form . . . society’ and specifically ‘a society with a peculiar, distinctive character’. So it is the same relations that constitute society as one kind of society or another that also, I suggest, constitute humans as one kind of human or another.

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Social Relations of Production and Property Ownership The idea that humans are constituted as ‘what they are’ by their social relationships is a recurrent one in The German Ideology. To take one example: [Feuerbach] does not conceive humans in their given social interconnection [Zusammenhange], under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are.47 However, to say that social relations of production constitute people in general as what they are in any particular historical epoch is not yet very informative. Over and above that, I shall now claim that for Marx, relations of production constitute the individuals who engage in them as owners (or non-owners) of different kinds of property, and thus as members of one class or another. This claim does not come through as clearly as it might in The German Ideology, where the concept of ‘social relations’ or ‘relations of production’ has an unclear connection to that of ‘the division of labour’. In this book it is the division of labour which is credited with constituting people as property owners. 48 However, social relations are described as having the independence and intractability to the will of individuals which would be necessary to constitute them as property owners: How is it that . . . the personal relating [Verhalten] of the individual is bound to be reified [sich versachlichen], estranged, and at the same time exists as a power independent of him and outside him, created by intercourse, and is transformed into social relations [Verhältnisse], into a series of powers which determine and subordinate the individual . . . ?49 Furthermore, this formation of independent and ‘thinglike’ social relations is directly associated with individuals’ own positions vis-à-vis each other also gaining a ‘thinglike’ character, that is, a character impervious to the individual will.50 The fact that Marx conceives social relations as composed out of individual ‘relating’ shows that he continues to think of them as interactional relations, even if what now makes an interactional relation between individuals into a ‘social relation’ is that, on a social scale, it has become independent of the will of any individual. Presumably,


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what this means is that its mere existence on such a scale exerts pressure on each individual to continue to relate to others in the same way, thus to continue to occupy the same position vis-à-vis others, so that the relation as a whole is self-sustaining, independently of the will of any one individual. From saying that such self-sustaining social relations impose social positions on individuals, it is a short step to stating that they constitute individuals as owners of particular types of property, conferring on them ownership statuses which they cannot change at will. In his later descriptions of capitalist society Marx takes this step explicitly. For Marx, ‘relation of production’ is generally a type-term rather than a token-term, so that for example if two different capitalists hire two different workers then the two particular relationships established are not two different relations of production but two instances of the same relation of production. I shall follow this usage of ‘relation’, reserving the term ‘particular relationship’ for referring to an individual instance of a relation. Marx thinks of capitalist society, like every other, as characterised by a mass of particular relationships of production which fall into a set of distinct types: a set of distinct relations of production. He describes money, capital, credit (interest-bearing capital), and so on, as relations of production of capitalist or bourgeois society.51 These relations are interconnected into a single system: ‘The relations of production of every society form a whole.’52 Each capitalist relation of production is expressed by one of the categories used by political economists, for ‘economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production’.53 Marx’s project in Capital, as he makes clear in the introduction to the Grundrisse, is to give a systematic exposition of the capitalist system of relations of production using for the most part the same categories, although in such a way as to make clear for the first time the historically transient character of that system. 54 It follows that the best guide to Marx’s understanding of the social relations of production of capitalism is Capital itself. We should understand the sections on ‘commodity’, ‘money’, ‘capital’, and so on in that book as expositions of the different relations of production of capitalism, in which each is shown as necessitated in some way by the previous one, so that they form an interconnected whole. Each relation of production constitutes the human products that are involved in it as a distinct kind of entity: the kind of entity after which Marx names the relation. Thus, roughly speaking, a human product is constituted as a commodity by virtue of being produced for exchange

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and then exchanged for other such products in the market. A commodity is constituted as money by virtue of being used exclusively for buying other commodities. Money and commodities are constituted as capital by being used in a process of repeatedly buying labour-power and other commodities from others at one price and selling them, or what is made with them, to others again at a higher price. What Marx says most often of capital is just as true of commodities, money and the rest: [C]apital is not a thing, it is a determinate social relation of production belonging to a determinate historical social formation, which presents itself as a thing and gives this thing a specific social character.55 What is more, though, I claim that the relations also constitute the individuals who engage in them as owners or non-owners of certain types of property: as commodity-owners, as owners of capital, and so on. Thus what makes working-class individuals the owners of their own labour-power as a commodity (and of nothing else) is that they work for employers to whom they sell that labour-power (and that they do not engage in certain other particular relationships). Here Marx says explicitly what he only suggested in his general account of social relations in The German Ideology: The worker’s propertylessness, and the ownership of living labour by objectified labour, or the appropriation of living labour by capital – both merely expressions of the same relation from opposite poles – are fundamental conditions of the bourgeois mode of production, in no way accidents irrelevant to it. These modes of distribution are the relations of production themselves, but sub specie distributionis.56

Factual Recognition It is tempting to think of these relations as presupposing property of some kind: to think, for example, that unless individuals are first recognised by each other as owners of their respective products they cannot engage in the relation of commodity exchange with one another. But Marx is emphatic that this kind of recognition arises through the relations in question rather than being presupposed by them. Thus in the Notes on Wagner he says of the relation of commodity exchange: With [Wagner] there is first right and then intercourse; in reality it is the other way round: first there is intercourse and then a legal order


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[Rechtsordnung] develops out of it. In the analysis of the circulation of commodities I have demonstrated that in developed trade, the exchangers tacitly recognise [anerkennen] each other as equal persons and owners of the respective goods to be exchanged by them; they do this even while they are offering each other their goods and agreeing to trade with one another. This factual [faktische] relation, which first arises through and in exchange itself, later obtains the form of right [rechtliche Form] in the contract etc.; but this form creates neither its content, the exchange, nor the relation [Beziehung] of persons to one another present in [the form], but vice versa.57 The notion of ‘tacit’ or ‘silent’ (stillschweigend) recognition in this passage is an obscure one. What Marx may have in mind is an analogue of the practical recognition of something as belonging to another. My practical recognition of something as yours would be my respecting your possession of it (your power over it) in my actions, where this respect is based on my thinking of your possession as ‘to be respected’, in other words, on an underlying cognitive recognition. My ‘tacit recognition’ of the thing as yours could then be my acting towards you in just the same way, but with or without any underlying cognitive recognition. It would be my behaving towards you exactly as if I cognitively recognised the thing as yours, but without necessarily having the corresponding thoughts. This would be an ‘effective’, or (to adopt Marx’s term in the quote) ‘factual’ recognition. Whereas the practical recognition would have a normative content, the factual recognition would not. Now my act of consensually exchanging goods with you, rather than simply trying to seize possession of your goods, is just such an act of ‘factual’ recognition, for doing so is doing what I would do if I thought of your possession as to be respected, regardless of whether as a matter of fact I do think of it in that way. With this understanding of ‘tacit recognition’, we can see Marx as describing a two-stage process in the above quote. The relation of exchange is, in itself, a relation of mutual ‘factual recognition’ in the above sense; this is what Marx means when he says that such a relation ‘arises through and in’ exchange. In a first stage this factual recognition constitutes each of the parties as the owner of what I shall call ‘factual property’, that is, as someone who is treated by another as if the other cognitively recognised one’s possession as ‘yours’. In a second stage such factual recognition, on a social scale, eventually gives rise to the publicly stated recognition of exchangers’ possessions as ‘theirs’ by legal system – a system of (positive) right – and the enforcement by this system of their

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stated property rights over these possessions, making contracts possible. This legal recognition constitutes them as the owners of legal property or ‘property by right’. Both kinds of property are distinct from de facto power over or ‘possession’ of a thing, for both are (fully) constituted by some form of recognition. If we generalise this account from commodity exchange to relations of production in general, the implication is that relations of production are in themselves relations of factual recognition, through which those who engage in them constitute each other as factual property owners or non-owners. Hence if we understand property in the sense of ‘factual property’ we can see how the different types of property ownership involved in capitalism – property in commodities, in capital, and so on – are not presupposed by the relations of production but are rather constituted by them. 58 Relations of production would then be relations of producing-for and transferring-the-product-to between individuals by engaging in which they constitutively confer (factual) property on each other, factual property of a different type for each relation of production. Thereby they constitute each other as certain types of humans. Thus the kinds of humanity which have existed, at least up until now, consist at root in kinds of property-ownership, and thus (given Marx’s definition of class) of class-membership. It might be said that it is all very well to say that relations of producing-for and transferring-to are in themselves relations of factual recognition and so constitute factual property, but this evades the issue of how such relations could ever get off the ground and sustain themselves without a prior legal recognition of property rights by a functioning legal system, or else a prior cognitive recognition of possessions by the participants. To see what Marx might have in mind, imagine a number of people who set out to collaborate in producing goods and transferring them to each other to enjoy: to form, in Marx’s terminology, a society. In order for them to succeed in this, they must somehow arrive at a way of dividing between them the various physical tasks involved. But they must also arrive at a way of dividing the decision-making over how and when these tasks are to be carried out: over who is to do what and who is to get what. Equally, they must find a way of allocating the ‘secondorder’ decision-making over how and when such decision-making powers are to be acquired, lost, or transferred from one individual to another. However they initially arrive at this ‘division of decision-making’ – whether by agreement, by the imposition of force by some over others, or by falling into it through a process of piecemeal adjustment – every


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act of producing and transferring goods in accordance with it will be, in itself, an act of factual recognition of the decision-makers as having authority over their respective areas of (first- or second-order) decision. Likewise every act of decision-making by them will be an act of ‘factual assertion’ of that authority, where factual assertion is understood as the self-referred equivalent of factual recognition. So the system of production and transfer will be at the same time a network of relations of factual recognition and assertion. The most natural way of delineating an area of decision is by reference to some entity which enters into the production process, be it a piece of land, a tool, a building, a person, or a person’s labour-power (labouring capacity). So, if we slightly expand the above definition of ‘factual property’ so that it is constituted by factual assertion as well as factual recognition, we can say that this network of relations of factual recognition and assertion will in effect constitute a distribution of factual property in such entities. Furthermore, as soon as the system of production and transfer is established it will have some tendency to sustain itself. For if all the individuals meet certain of their needs as a result of the workings of the whole system, then they all know that if they continue to do as they have been doing until now they will at least continue to meet those needs, so they have at least that incentive to carry on as they have been doing. Also, over time the system will tend to give rise to cognitive recognitions corresponding to its factual recognitions. For the natural person to look to for a decision on some issue is the person who took the decision last time, and any individual who acts in contravention of the existing division of decision-making is likely to interrupt the process of production and provoke negative reactions from all those who are adversely affected. As a result, individuals are likely to come to actually think of the decision-makers as having an authority over their areas that is to be respected, instead of merely treating them as if that was what they thought. A normative consciousness will emerge in them which is ‘consciousness of existing practice’.59 In turn this cognitive recognition will tend to re-express itself in action, transforming merely factual recognition into genuine practical recognition. We could call the resulting jointly cognitive and practical recognition, when it is verbally articulated and shared across society, ‘social recognition’, and the kind of property it constitutes ‘socially recognised property’. Social recognition will further help to sustain the distribution of decision-making, and so the system of production and transfer as a whole, although it would not be able to sustain the distribution of decision-making by itself. (All the points made in this paragraph for recognition can also be made for assertion.)

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Suppose, finally, that the property statuses of individuals do not vary continuously but fall into a small number of types. The individuals with each different type of property status would then form a class. At a certain point those with the most advantageous property status (those who derive most material benefit and economic power from the distribution of decision-making) might organise themselves to formulate explicitly the extent of the factually (and socially) recognised decisionmaking authority of each individual, as the individual’s property rights, and to establish a mechanism for punishing those who flout these rights. In other words they might institute themselves as a ruling class with a state. Factual property would then become legal property.60 Such a mechanism would again help to sustain the distribution of decisionmaking (and so the system of production and transfer), but it would not be able to maintain the distribution of decision-making by itself. It would only be able to ‘ride on the back’ of the overall activity of production and transfer, and of the informal processes (including those that generate social recognition) through which that activity tends to maintain the distribution of decision-making. For example, the mechanism might draw passive or active support for its punitive actions from those who depend most on the smooth running of the production process. If the number of people involved in this society is small, then it would be rather easy for a determined individual or group radically to change the existing distribution of decision-making. But if the number is large then the process of production and transfer might reinforce the existing distribution of decision-making so strongly that it became completely self-sustaining and ‘thinglike’, and impossible for any but the largest and most determined group to overthrow. In this way the social production process as a whole would sustain the systems of socially recognised and legal property, and so the economic and political power of the propertied over the rest.

The Definition of Social Relations of Production The plausibility of this story depends on a number of psychological and other assumptions. But if it is plausible, then it shows how relations of producing-for and transferring-to which constitute a system of factual property can be self-sustaining, and that they can give rise to and sustain corresponding systems of socially recognised and legal property, even if those systems in turn help to reinforce them. This makes possible the definition of relations of production that, finally, I would like to propose: social relations of production are those self-sustaining relations of


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producing-for and transferring-to that are at the same time relations of factual recognition and assertion of individuals as first- and secondorder decision-makers over entities involved in the production process, and thus that are (fully) interconstitutive of individuals as owners or non-owners of factual property. It may be objected to this account that individuals’ property or propertylessness does not seem to them at all something which is brought into existence by their participating in relations like the commodity relation or the capital relation, but rather something which is a precondition of such participation, and in fact which forces them into it. The response would be that for Marx each individual’s factual property status is not determined by the particular relationships in which that individual engages, but it is determined by the totality of particular relationships in which the members of society as a whole engage, each of them an instance of one of the society’s relations of production. This totality of relationships confronts the individual as ‘thinglike’, as something they can do nothing to change, but it consists in nothing but intentional activities of individuals directed towards each other: it was, therefore, precisely the personal, individual relating [Verhalten] of individuals, their relating to one another as individuals, that created the existing relations [Verhältnisse] and daily reproduces them anew.61 In turn, of course, this totality gives rise to a system of socially recognised and legal property, and in standard cases the individual may feel that it is the system of social recognition (in whatever terms the individual describes it), or the legal system, that maintains the individual’s property status. Marx’s point would be that these systems in turn ride on the back of the system of relations of production. It may also be objected that to define relations of production as relations of producing-for and transferring-to is to make them into what G. A. Cohen has called ‘work relations’ or ‘material relations of production’, that is, relations defined and differentiated from each other by the physical characteristics of the production process or the product being transferred. 62 However, this is not the case. Of course, every particular relationship that is an instance of a relation of production involves some particular production process or product, which will have physical characteristics. But it is not these characteristics that make the particular relationship count as an instance of one relation of production or another, rather, it is the characteristics of the particular

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relationship as one of factual recognition and assertion that make it count as such an instance. To take as an example the commodity relation, a particular relationship between two individuals counts as an instance of the commodity relation by virtue of the fact that each individual transfers a good to the other by mutual consent, for it is in virtue of this aspect of the particular relationship that their actions count as acts of recognition and assertion. The technical aspect of the particular relationship, the fact that the exchange is of bricks for wine, say, is irrelevant. The relationship would be an instance of the commodity relation no matter what the particular goods exchanged were. On this account of Marx’s social relations of production, they are akin to Hegel’s historical relations of recognition and assertion in that they are themselves relations of recognition and assertion of a certain kind. Thereby like Hegel’s, they are fully interconstitutive of different kinds of human beings. Yet relations of production are distinct in that for Marx the recognition and assertion they constitute is not cognitive and practical but factual, and in that it is exclusively recognition and assertion of individuals as (factual) property owners. Most importantly, relations of production are distinct from Hegel’s relations of recognition and assertion in that they are not merely recognitive relations. They are relations of producing-for and transferring-to that as such are relations of factual recognition and assertion. This gives them a stability, rooted in the needs that human production supplies, that relations of recognition and assertion standing alone could never have.

The Problem of Legality Much more would need to be done to spell out properly the interpretation of social relations of production that has been sketched here, and to show that it both fits Marx’s overall use of the term and renders his views on the structure of human societies coherent. Here I will conclude by briefly pointing out how it deals with the problem of legality, and comparing it in this respect with what is perhaps the best-known interpretation of social relations of production in this country, that advanced by G. A. Cohen. To recall, the problem stems from the fact that Marx seems to identify relations of production with property relations, yet if property relations are legal relations they would seem to belong to the legal superstructure. In the present interpretation, social relations of production are relations of producing and transferring which, as at once relations of factual recognition, constitute factual property. Marx’s apparent identification


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of them with property relations can be explained by assuming that when he makes it he is thinking of factual property. But such property remains quite distinct from legal property, which can therefore be placed unambiguously in the superstructure. Cohen interprets social relations of production as relations of de facto power over means of production and labour-power.63 He then solves the problem of legality in a way akin to that proposed above. He explains Marx’s apparent identification of relations of production with property relations by arguing that these relations of de facto power are typically maintained by legal property rights that are backed by force, so that Marx found it convenient to use the language of property in an extended way as a means of referring to the de facto powers that are maintained by property rights. 64 Such powers are clearly distinguished from the legal property rights that maintain them, so again the latter can be assigned unambiguously to the superstructure. However, in Cohen’s definition a relation of production consists only in the ability of an individual to use a thing, or to direct another individual’s actions, in various ways. It does not consist in any actual pattern of interaction between individuals that results from their exercising such abilities. So for Cohen relations of production are not interactional relations. By contrast, as I have argued above, Marx consistently thinks of relations of production as interactional relations, so that an ability-based definition of relations of production flies completely in the face of Marx’s usage of the term. The definition proposed here, instead, explicitly understands relations of production as interactional, and so in this respect at least fits Marx’s usage better than Cohen’s does. Space does not allow a fuller comparison of the present definition of social relations of production with Cohen’s, or with others in the literature. 65 Here I hope to have shown that it is at least intelligible, and accordingly that there is a case for taking the Fichtean and Hegelian ideas of mutual recognition and mutual constitution more seriously, in our attempt to understand Marx, than most commentators have done until now.

Notes 1 I shall use ‘relation of production’ as a shorthand for ‘social relation of production’. A longer version of this article appeared in Historical Materialism no. 2 (1998), pp. 57–79. I am grateful to Alison Stone for discussions that helped me develop some of its ideas, and to Joseph McCarney, Christopher Arthur, and the editors of Historical Materialism for their valuable comments on earlier drafts.

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2 K. Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, in K. Marx and F. Engels Collected Works, 9 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), p. 212; K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx– Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–71), 6, p. 408. This and most other translations have been modified. 3 K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), pp. 20–1; Werke, 13, p. 8. 4 K. Marx, ‘Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality’, Collected Works, 6, p. 337; Werke, 4, p. 356. 5 Marx, Contribution to the Critique, p. 21; Werke, 13, p. 9. See also K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Collected Works, 6, p. 197. 6 The problem is named, and stated as I have presented it here, by G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 217–18. 7 J. Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism (London: Longmans, 1954), p. 21. 8 At Science of Rights, §4, p. 67; Grundlage, §4, p. 44; he describes thinking of the other as free as ‘recognition’. At Science of Rights, p. 71; Grundlage, p. 47; he at first describes treating the other as free as ‘commonly valid recognition’, but then simply calls it ‘recognition’. 9 In German, the term Anerkennung is standardly used only where some kind of respect is implied. See M. Inwood, ed., A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 245–7. 10 Fichte, Science of Rights, §4, pp. 78–9; Grundlage, p. 52. Kroeger’s translation here omits a major part of the sentence. 11 The term ‘interactional relation’ (or ‘relation of interaction’) is from J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 95. Elster defines such a relation simply as one in which ‘two individuals actually interact with one another’. 12 The phrase in parentheses is omitted in Kroeger’s translation. I am not able to explain it satisfactorily. 13 Fichte, Science of Rights, §3, pp. 60–1; Grundlage, p. 39. 14 The derivation is in G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, tr. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §§418–86, pp. 158–243; Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, III, in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke: Werkausgabe, eds. E. Moldenhauer & K. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 10, pp. 205–305. It is greatly clarified in lectures that Hegel gave in 1825 on §§413–39 of the Philosophy of Mind. Students’ notes from the lectures are published in German and English as an appendix to Vol. 3 of G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, in 3 volumes, ed. M. J. Petry (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979). 15 This claim is spelt out in section 2 of the longer version of this article, cited in note 1 above. 16 What follows is a condensed and revised version of my reconstruction of this section of Hegel’s argument in A. Chitty, ‘On Hegel, the Subject and Political Justification’, Res Publica 2:2 (1996), pp. 181–203. My understanding of Hegel’s usage of ‘recognition’, in particular, differs in the present version. 17 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §429Z, p. 170; Werke, 10, p. 219. In references to the Philosophy of Mind, ‘Z’ refers to the Zusätze or additions to the main paragraphs, which are composed from students’ lecture notes.


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18 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §430, p. 170; Werke, 10, p. 219. 19 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §430, p. 170; Werke, 10, p. 219. 20 Hegel, Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 3, p. 333; also p. 335. Boden is translated there as ‘basis’. 21 The argument summarised in this paragraph is given at Hegel, Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 3, pp. 333–7. 22 The explanation of the failure of the master–servant relation given in this paragraph is based on hints given by Hegel at Philosophy of Mind, §433Z, p. 174; Werke, 10, p. 223; and at Philosophy of Mind, §436Z, p. 176; Werke, 10, p. 226. 23 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §436, p. 176; Werke, 10, p. 226. 24 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §436Z, p. 176; Werke, 10, p. 226. 25 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §436, p. 176; Werke, 10, p. 226. 26 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §436, p. 176; Werke, 10, p. 226. 27 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §§437–9, pp. 177–8; Werke, 10, pp. 227–9. 28 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §440Z, pp. 179–80; Werke, 10, p. 230. 29 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 48; also pp. 54–5, passim. 30 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §440Z, p. 179; Werke, 10, p. 230. 31 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §486, p. 242; Werke, 10, p. 304. 32 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §486, p. 242; Werke, 10, p. 304. See also G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §29, p. 58; Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 80. 33 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §4, p. 35; Werke, 7, p. 46. 34 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §36, p. 69; Werke, 7, p. 95. 35 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §36, p. 70; Werke, 7, p. 98. 36 Two accounts of the Philosophy of Right that focus on the role of mutual recognition within it are M. Theunissen, ‘The Repressed Intersubjectivity in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in D. Cornell et al., Hegel and Legal Theory (London: Routledge, 1991), and R. R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), part 2. Neither of them supplements recognition with assertion in the way that I have done here. 37 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §190, p. 228; Werke, 7, p. 348. 38 For this account of species-being, see A. Chitty, ‘The Early Marx on Needs’, Radical Philosophy, 64 (1993), 23–31, and especially A. Chitty, ‘First Person Plural Ontology and Praxis’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 97, 1 (1997), 81–96. 39 K. Marx, Comments on James Mill, Éléments d’Économie politique, Collected Works, 3, pp. 216–17; Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, pp. 450–1. 40 For example in Comments on James Mill, pp. 218–19; Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, p. 453. 41 K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family: Or Critique of Critical Critique, Collected Works, 4, p. 43. Werke, 2, p. 44. The extensive italicisation in the original is omitted. In quotations in this essay I have translated Beziehung as ‘relation’ or ‘connection’, adding the German in brackets. 42 Verhalten (relating) can also be translated as ‘conduct’ or ‘behaviour’. The translation ‘relating’ brings out its close connection with Verhältnis for Marx, exemplified further below.

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43 For example in the Comments on James Mill, p. 212; Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, p. 446; and in K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Collected Works, 3, pp. 296f; Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, pp. 536f. 44 See Marx, Comments on James Mill, pp. 218–19; Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, p. 453. 45 Marx, Comments on James Mill, pp. 227–8; Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, p. 462. 46 The idea of social relations as ‘internal relations’, that is as relations that are interconstitutive for those who engage in them, is advanced in B. Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), Ch. 2, and also (using formulations closer to my own) in C. Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx’s Theory of Social Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), pp. 30–9. 47 Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, p. 41; Werke, 3, p. 44. 48 See for example The German Ideology, p. 32; Werke, 3, p. 22. 49 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 245; Werke, 3, pp. 227–8. See also the reference to ‘the transformation of individual relating (Verhalten) into its opposite, a purely thinglike relating (sachliches Verhalten)’, p. 438; Werke, 3, p. 423. 50 See Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 437; Werke, 3, p. 423. 51 On money, see Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 145. On capital, see the next quotation in the text. On credit, see Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 162. 52 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 166. 53 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 165. Marx says the same thing on p. 162. See also Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. M. Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 105, 106; Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: Dietz, 1953), pp. 25, 26–7. 54 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 100–8; Grundrisse der Kritik, pp. 21–8. 55 K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 953; Werke, 25, p. 822. Marx says the same thing (emphasising that capital is a social relation ‘between persons’) in K. Marx, Capital Vol. 1, tr. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 932; Werke, 23, p. 793. 56 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 832; Grundrisse der Kritik, pp. 716–17. See also Capital, 3, p. 911; Werke, 25, p. 784. 57 K. Marx, Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner (1879–80), in Karl Marx: Texts on Method, tr. and ed. T. Carver (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), p. 210; Werke, 19, p. 377. 58 There is an early adumbration of this idea in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, pp. 279–80; Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, p. 520; where Marx says that private property is ‘a consequence of’ alienated labour. Alienated labour is that form of producing for another which is in itself factual recognition of the worker’s labour-power, and product, as another’s. 59 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 45; Werke, 3, p. 31. 60 Marx describes such a process of the solidification of factual property over time, and its subsequent ‘sanctification’ as legal property by the ruling class, in Capital 3, p. 929; Werke, 25, pp. 801–2.


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61 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 438; Werke, 3, p. 423. On the idea that humans create their own relations, see also Marx, Grundrisse, p. 712; Grundrisse der Kritik, p. 600; and Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 165–6. 62 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, pp. 111–12. 63 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, pp. 34–5, 63–5. I ignore the extension to the definition, introduced by Cohen at p. 35, to include relations ‘presupposing’ such relations of de facto power. See also G. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 5–6. 64 Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom, p. 224. 65 For a slightly more extended discussion, see part 9 of the longer version of this article, cited in note 1 above.

Acknowledgement A Research Leave Scheme award from the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy made it possible for this essay to be written.

9 The End of History in Hegel and Marx Howard Williams

Despite many differences of detail and their fundamental metaphysical clash about Idealism and Materialism Hegel’s and Marx’s views of history are very similar. The assumptions they share in common are: • The development of human history falls into distinct stages or epochs. • These stages represent a change in gravity in the location of historical development from East to West. • World history is progressive. There is an improvement from the more primitive condition of mankind to the more advanced. • This is not just a material improvement, there is also a cultural and moral improvement. • Human freedom represents one of the main goals of this progressive development. • There is a distinct point of culmination where the higher level of society is achieved. For Hegel this point of culmination is in the Germanic Protestant world, for Marx it is communist society. • This end-point is dynamic. There is a high point reached, but the high point is a continuous process. • Both Hegel and Marx therefore take a teleological view of history. They believe there is a purpose underlying the unfolding of events in world history. Another way of putting this is to say that Hegel and Marx both believe that the course followed by world history is a necessary one. There is one fundamental point of difference that stands out in Hegel and Marx’s appreciation of history. This difference is to be found in their choices of agency in bringing about the necessary steps forward. 198

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Ultimately, Hegel has the one agent who is both worldly and otherworldly, namely Geist or spirit. Spirit for Hegel calls the tune in the unfolding of history. Human individuals are the agents of the one higher agent. Marx rejects this theological standpoint. His agents are, in contrast, social classes and the forces of production.1 Amongst these agents there is one candidate for the heroic role. With Marx the proletariat or the working class steps on the scene as the agent which can complete the task of world history. The following discussions of Hegel and Marx are intended to illustrate and help account for the similarities in their views of world history and to bring out the differences in the dramatis personae. Flowing from this one fundamental difference in terms of agency there is one further distinction that I shall try to highlight in this essay between Hegel’s and Marx’s account of history. With Hegel, because the agent behind history is spirit, our actions as human individuals appear as its secondary effects. In Hegel’s philosophy of history we are not conscious of the overall outcome of our actions. There is no question of our individually shaping history. With Marx in contrast because his principal agent is identified as a social class there is an opportunity for conscious intervention to shape the course of history. Many of Marx’s writings are devoted to the question of precisely in what way the working class, and individuals within it or acting on its behalf, can most effectively shape history in the desired direction. Marx considers many modes of social and political action from public and private debates, to strikes, to political agitation, legislative reform, government executive action, revolution and war. It is arguably the case that the form of social and political action that most takes his eye as the catalyst for progressive social change is revolution. In Marx’s view social conflict quite often comes to a head in a revolution which inaugurates a period representing a new and higher stage in our history.

Hegel In understanding Hegel’s views of history we have also to understand his view of philosophy because the two are intertwined. Hegel regards history as it is ordinarily understood as the outward manifestation of a deeper process of the developing of spirit: History is a conscious, self-mediating process – Spirit emptied out into time . . . The goal, absolute knowledge, or spirit that knows itself as spirit, has for its path the recollection of the spirits as they are in

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themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is history; but regarded from the side of their comprehended organization, it is the science of knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended history, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone. Only from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for him his own infinitude.2 Theology also comes into this general philosophical vision of the realisation of spirit. True philosophy for Hegel comprises within it the most important teachings of the Christian religion. The key concept in Hegel’s philosophy is, in our view, the concept of spirit or Geist. The concept of Geist states in the shortest form possible Hegel’s philosophical idealism. Hegel is not an idealist in the everyday moral sense that he expects well of other individuals and the world in general, but in the deeper philosophical sense that he thinks that reality is ultimately thought or idea. Philosophers may broadly be categorised into idealists or materialists. These are broad categories Hegel himself accepted and did much to foster. Materialists are those who believe that the world is ultimately matter in origin and make-up and idealists are those, like Hegel, who believe in the intellectual roots and make-up of the world. Some philosophers try to bridge the two standpoints and others try to ignore it altogether, but even with these types of philosopher some materialist or idealist tendencies can be read into their writings. Hegel would argue that all genuine philosophers have to take a stand on this issue, and he would go further to suggest that all true philosophy is idealism. Commentators on Hegel tend to differ in their reading of his concept of Geist.3 At one end of the spectrum Hegel’s concept of Geist may be seen as broadly equivalent with the Christian idea of God, and at the other end of the spectrum the concept is seen as a kind of secularised social mind. It is arguable, however, that Hegel wishes to see spirit as a wholly comprehensive concept which includes within it both the Christian view of the deity (spirit in a pictorial or representational form) and the more secularised notion of a human collective consciousness. As Hegel sees it, each individual mind is both part of and distinct from this greater mind. In other words, as individuals we can both be at one with mind in general but also at odds with it in our behaviour and action.

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As Hegel sees it, the world is a product of spirit, but not in the sense that each individual person knows what spirit is. Each individual has the task of acquainting himself or herself with spirit. Spirit can only be known in its entirety through philosophy. But this does not mean that those who have not read philosophy will be permanently estranged from spirit. Living in the world and being part of society each individual comes partially to know spirit. Hegel’s philosophical idealism is highly concrete and social in character. He does not, for example, accept the Biblical account of creation as empirically correct. For him this is not how spirit comes down to earth. Hegel preferred to accept the latest scientific accounts of the origins of the universe. He was deeply impressed by natural science and he devoted a volume of his major philosophical work the Encyclopaedia to the Philosophy of Nature. Many Hegel scholars regard this book as highly as any other of Hegel’s principal publications. But for all this realistic acceptance of scientific knowledge, Hegel still regarded nature as ideal. He sees nature as the other of spirit which demonstrates itself in the end to be a part of spirit. Another way of putting this for Hegel is to say that nature represents the idea in its alienation or externalisation. The great achievement of natural science is to reduce the mass of external data on nature to a comprehensive totality in the scientific law. As laws are the product of thought Hegel takes this to imply that nature is ultimately thought. So Hegel presents the philosophy of nature as the overcoming of the alienation of spirit, or the alienated relation which we initially have with nature. This brief summary illustrates how with Hegel nothing can resist the philosophical power of spirit. Materialists who see the existence of nature as the refutation of idealism are for Hegel shown to be wrong by the science of nature. Hegel approaches history in much the same frame of mind. He is convinced it has to be reduced to a pattern that is compatible with the intellect. History is therefore another respect in which spirit steps into the world. We might see the writing of history as a way of bringing order to what in itself is diverse and confused. The philosophy of history we might then see as another way of bringing shape to the immense variety of individual historical works. For Hegel in contrast the task of the historian and subsequently the philosopher of history is to bring out the order that is already present in history through the activity of spirit. The impression that Hegel gives that history has come to an end in his time gains weight from the more marked impression that Hegel gives that philosophy has reached its highest point in his time. Hegel’s

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key thesis is arguably not about the end of history but about the end of philosophy. Here the evidence seems indisputable: A new epoch has arisen in the world. It would appear as if the world-spirit had at last succeeded in stripping off from itself all alien objective being, and apprehending itself at last as absolute spirit, in developing from itself what for it is objective, and keeping it in its power, yet remaining at rest, The strife of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness which seemed to the former to lie outside itself, now ceases. Finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; and in this way absolute self-consciousness has, on the other hand, acquired the actuality which it lacked before. This is the whole history of the world in general up to the present, and the history of philosophy in particular, which only depicts this strife. Now it seems to have reached its goal, when this absolute selfconsciousness, which it had the work of representing, has ceased to be alien, and when spirit is thus actualized as spirit.4 Hegel’s idea of the end of history rests upon a cumulative view of the history of philosophy. This in turn influences Hegel’s view of contemporary philosophy and his own philosophy within that contemporary picture. In essence Hegel attempts the impossible with his philosophy. He would like to regard his philosophical system as the logical culmination of all previous philosophy as well as the summation of the key debates in philosophy in his own time. Academically, Hegel wants to take on all-comers, not simply by defeating them in a head to head confrontation, but rather by including what is true in their ideas within his own philosophy. Hegel’s philosophy aims at totality, a totality which in academic terms reduces all other points of view into moments of his own thinking. This is a vigorous and extraordinarily ambitious approach. What is most difficult to accept is that Hegel went some way towards achieving this goal. He does give a plausible account of the development of the history of philosophy as the development of the one philosophy, and, by the end of his intellectual career at Berlin University in 1831, he was regarded as pre-eminent amongst German philosophers. However, if Hegel’s philosophy is to be regarded critically we cannot take it at his evaluation. Hegel was an impressively well-read and successful philosopher, but he cannot be said to have brought philosophy to a close. At best we can regard him as bringing to a close one existing episode in the development of philosophy. Hegel’s own account of

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philosophy does not rule out this possibility, it is simply that he does not himself put much emphasis on it. His vocabulary in describing the conclusions and implications of his own philosophical idealism is almost entirely triumphalist and celebratory. In the early Phenomenology of Spirit we are told about the emergence of Absolute Spirit from its conflicts with all forms of finite spirit, in the Science of Logic the Absolute Idea emerges from the labyrinth of forms of logical concepts, and in the Philosophy of Right the state in its fully accomplished form is deduced from modern civil society. Hegel presents his philosophy as the truth revealing itself. Although Hegel does not rule out the possibility that his own philosophy is just one shape the absolute philosophy takes on, the whole thrust of his approach tends to create the opposite impression. In philosophical terms Hegel takes on the appearance of being at the top of the evolutionary scale. But an alternative view of philosophy might simply regard him as representing one peak in a large vista of similar peaks. In trying simultaneously to scale all the philosophical heights, Hegel, if we are to see him as successful, would rob others of the autonomy of thought. His approach in this respect contrasts markedly with Kant, who is anxious to encourage everyone to think for themselves. Kant is conscious that every philosopher wants to create his own system and desires not to be bound by the conclusions of others. Hegel seems to want all his contemporary philosophers to give up, and possibly all future philosophers, by accepting the truth of his system. Hegel does not entirely rule out philosophical pluralism but his approach does not invite or encourage it. Hegel’s vision of the end of history emerges from his comprehensive, totalising engagement with philosophy. Since absolute spirit has unveiled itself in philosophy it has now to be shown to have realised itself in the social world. Hegel’s synthesising efforts are not without their parallel in the history of philosophy. Aristotle in a similar way studied the history of Greek philosophy and sought to draw from it insights that informed his own philosophy. In attempting to answer Plato, Aristotle drew heavily upon the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Hegel seems to have followed this lead in trying to answer Kant. Hegel is also inspired by Aristotle in the way in which he looks upon nature and society functionally. Aristotle believed that objects and institutions had an immanent telos which it was the job of the philosopher to discover and outline. Hegel takes this approach to history and the history of philosophy. Schools of thought, institutions and political leaders are seen as part of one purposeful picture leading towards a successful present.

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The philosophy of history follows on from and is subordinate to Hegel’s general philosophy. The philosophy of history outlines the development of the process of evolution which has already been observed within philosophy itself. World history is the way in which spirit manifests itself in the world. That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and realisation of spirit – this is the true Theodicaea, the justification of God in history. Only this insight can reconcile spirit with the history of the world – viz. that what has happened, and what is happening every day, is not only not ‘without God’, but is essentially his work. 5 Spirit does not manifest itself immediately in its complete form. The spirit of the world gradually reveals itself in a number of ascending forms, leading finally to freedom: Universal history exhibits the gradation in the development of that principle whose substantial purport is the consciousness of freedom. 6 As Hegel sees it, these ascending forms are implicit in spirit from the beginning: Here we have only to indicate that spirit begins with a germ of infinite possibility, but only possibility – containing its substantial existence in an undeveloped form, as the object and goal which it reaches only in its resultant – full reality. 7 The development of spirit begins in the Orient. Here human history dawns: In Asia arose the light of spirit, and therefore the history of the world.8 But it receives its completion only in the west: The history of the world travels from east to west, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning. 9 Like the physical sun, the sun of self-consciousness first arises in the east, but it reaches its greatest brilliance in the west. Freedom is the goal: The question of the means by which freedom develops itself to a world, conducts us to the phenomenon of history itself. Although freedom is primarily an undeveloped idea, the means it uses are external and phenomenal; presenting themselves in history to our sensuous vision. 10

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The outer development of world history is evidence of the inner essence. The whole process is teleological: The history of the world begins with its general aim – the realisation of the idea of spirit – only in its implicit form that is, as nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct; and the whole process of history (as already observed) is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one. 11 An end-point is certainly reached, but this end point is itself a process: Thought is the grade to which spirit has now advanced. It involves the harmony of being in its purest essence, challenging the external world to exhibit the same reason which the individual I possesses. 12

Marx The idea of history plays a central role in Marx’s thinking. He likes to situate our self-awareness in an historical context. For Marx there is no being which is separate from time, just as there is no conscious being which is separate from human existence. Human existence presupposes a human identity, a human identity which can only be shaped or formed through an ability to tell a story about ourselves. Human awareness rests upon a directional notion of the past, a directional notion of the past which takes us to the present and also projects further onto a viable future. A metanarrative about ourselves is not optional in Marx’s account of human awareness, it is necessary to provide us with a human identity. In this brief presentation of Marx’s views about the end of history I am going to regard Marx’s thinking as a totality. I make no attempt to distinguish in the manner associated with Althusser between a young Marx and a mature Marx.13 This is not because that I believe that this distinction is without interest, but I do believe it exaggerates discontinuities in Marx’s thinking. Clearly every genuine intellectual’s thinking is in a process of development in which new ideas displace less satisfactory ones, but this generally takes place according to a discernible pattern which tells us a great deal about the intellectual concerned. I also think that in regard to Marx’s idea of history there is, in particular, a remarkable consistency in the position to which Marx holds throughout his intellectual career. We begin with a striking statement of Marx’s views from the 1844 Paris Manuscripts:

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Communism as the positive transcendence of private property, as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being – a return become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. The entire movement of history is, therefore, both its actual act of genesis (the birth act of its empirical existence) and also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming.14 With these words, written as he was coming to terms with the subject of political economy for the first time, Marx expresses his belief that there is an end to history. This end is implicit within history itself, and the end is communism. As Marx sees it, history is the bearer of a gift to mankind, the gift of a progressive development of society towards an ideal. He suggests we should therefore read history backwards from the standpoint of the realisation of communism. Marx presents his account of history in the 1844 Manuscripts apocalyptically and as entirely in accord with the facts. For Marx it is almost irrefutable that communism represents the coming together of all the diverse strands of human historical development. His announcement that communism is ‘the riddle of history solved’ takes on a miraculous air. The mundane processes of everyday life are transformed into activities of a semi-divine significance. It has to be recognised that a philosophy of history does have the capacity of giving significance and meaning to social and individual activities. Philosophies of history attempt to situate individual and social events within a wider context and may also regard those events as part of a narrative affecting the human race as a whole. This is the approach to the philosophy of history which Marx would be aware of from Hegel and Kant. Also Marx’s religious background as part of a Jewish family converted to Protestantism would have made him conscious of historical narratives, like that of the history of the Jews and the life of Christ, with a universal significance. However, Marx takes this broad framework of the philosophy of history and gives it an entirely new application. With Marx the philosophy of history is given an acute

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actuality in the present. The present with him may not only be understood as part of a process leading to a greater goal, but also is the process of realising that greater goal: Communism is for us not a state of affairs still to be established, not an ideal to which reality has to adjust. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs. 15 As Marx sees it, the material process of production of human society unavoidably leads in the direction of communism. The pattern of history is dictated not so much by a simply intellectually conceived goal but rather by a necessary process internal to economic development and human society. Individual and social purposes are structured by economic needs. Marx regards this as an entirely new insight he and Engels have brought to the study of history: In the whole conception of history up to the present this actual basis of history has been either totally neglected or considered as a minor matter irrelevant to the course of history. Thus history must always be written according to an extraneous standard. The actual production of life appears as something unhistorical, while the historical appears as something separated from ordinary life, something extrasuperterrestial. Thus the relation of man to nature is excluded from history and the antithesis of nature and history is created.16 When we survey the impact of Marx’s work in retrospect we can see there is an enormous gap between the intellectual acceptability of his explanatory (theoretical) account of modern society and the reception and acceptability of his prognosis for and moral recommendations about society. Many aspects of his depiction and explanation of the modern economy have gained widespread acceptance, but his extrapolations and projections from this condition have been rejected and even, at times, subjected to ridicule. We can see this contrast in David Saunders’ essay on Capitalism, which in its conceptual framework owes a great deal to Marx but which rejects out of hand Marx’s recommendation of socialism. As Saunders puts it, ‘the challenge from socialism has collapsed. Throughout the world wherever it has been tried, socialism has failed and is now rapidly being abandoned.’17 But then Saunders goes on to define capitalism very much in Marxian terms. First, capitalism entails the ‘private ownership of property’.18 Secondly, under such a system economic activity is ‘organized around the systematic and

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self-interested pursuit of profit’;19 and, thirdly, ‘goods and services are exchanged on the basis of market prices’.20 Finally, Saunders picks out as a hallmark of the capitalist system, in a phrase which precisely echoes Marx, the fact that it ‘is driven by the motive to accumulate profit’.21 This demonstrates how Marx provided a very informative, influential and illuminating understanding of the modern economy. He was able to systematise very effectively the ideas of the classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. Marx’s theory of value (which he shared with the classical economists) is, of course, now disputed as is his theory of profit, but in general Marx’s theories form much of the backdrop for the contemporary understanding of capitalism. What Marx arguably failed to do was to provide an adequate account of the kind of economy and society he preferred and perhaps, more tellingly, he failed to show convincingly how we might successfully get from capitalism to socialism. In this respect I should like to suggest that Marx turns out to be a poor moral and political philosopher. He tends quite often to sideline moral issues with deleterious effects upon his powers of advocacy for the cause of social improvement he supports. Possibly this is because Marx’s programme is too ambitious; he seems to have expected too much from his own foresight and too much also of the human species.22 Here I would like to explore the notion that Marx’s ambivalent and arguably flawed contribution to the transformation of modern society might be attributed to his excessive enthusiasm for the revolutionary ideal. He is, I suggest, too enamoured of the revolutionary culture of late eighteenth-century France and fails to take into account fully the fragile, corruptible and reversible nature of human civilisation. Marx’s account of human history is simply too optimistic. He seems only to see an upward path, where others less sanguine can foresee complications and possible tragedies.23 One interesting example of this is Marx’s response to the Paris Commune of 1871. By all accounts the progressive movement in France suffered an enormous setback with the defeat of the uprising, but Marx remains undaunted in his address to the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association: ‘Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.’24 Failure is turned into success. The socialist movement in Paris and Europe made no mistakes, did not perhaps generate too much fear in other social classes and political movements. The

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moral question of whether or not it was right to seek to achieve political ends by violence is not addressed. Aristotle believed that the successful practice of politics required both sound theoretical understanding and what he calls wisdom. Wisdom can only be acquired through experience whereas theoretical knowledge can derive from intelligence present in an individual as a natural gift. 25 No one can doubt Marx’s brilliance, but one can doubt his wisdom. Wisdom seems to absent from his view of the end of history. Marx’s political programme for the end of history rests, arguably, too much on his abundant intelligence and too little upon Aristotelian practical wisdom (phronesis). Marx appears to grant little special capacity to any political leader. He conveys the impression that it is a job that anyone might successfully do, certainly no great respect is given to the idea of experience in office. Indeed the impression is given that the bourgeois leaders of modern society are harmed rather than improved by their experience of ruling. Marx leaves a great deal to chance, however, by advocating an instant revolutionary change of regime. It seems implausible to suggest that one can become a successful political leader overnight. Very few passengers would claim to be able to take over the captaincy of ship when it runs into trouble, but Marx’s revolutionary theory betrays no equivocation or doubt about the advisability of putting a wholly inexperienced team in command. In Marx’s defence, it might be said that he does not advocate the revolutionary path to the exclusion of all others. The working class can come to power within each state according to national circumstances, but Marx none the less tends to condone the revolutionary method and never to condemn it. As he and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto: ‘the Communist every where, support[s] every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things’.26 In his remarkable three-volume book The Main Currents of Marxism the Polish philosopher Lesek Kolakowski speaks of there being three underlying motifs to Marx’s thinking. These are, first, the romantic motif; second, the Promethean motif; and, third, the rationalist, determinist Enlightenment motif. 27 All three aspects of Marx’s thinking, as Kolakowski interprets it, tie in closely with the view of Marx I have presented here. Marx’s belief that the human race must have a radically different future from the circumstances in which it finds itself in capitalist society derives, arguably, from his attachment to romantic ideals of true community and unforced, creative labour. Marx, along with the Romantics, believes there is more to human existence than the simple calculation of monetary gain and the amassing of wealth in the form of

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commodities, and he looks to a form of society where gain and wealth can be subordinated to human creativity. But it is perhaps the Promethean motif which is the most typical of Marx. Marx was drawn to the tale of Prometheus – who had incurred the anger of the gods by stealing fire from them – perhaps because of its combination of defiance and radicalism. As Kolakowski puts it: ‘The Promethean idea which recurs constantly in Marx’s work is that of faith in man’s unlimited powers as self-creator, contempt for tradition and worship of the past, history as man’s self-realisation through labour.’28 Paradoxically, however, Marx attempts to combine these two active motifs with the apparently less activist adherence to the scientific, rationalist approach of the Enlightenment. Despite his vision of us as what we should be like – bold and adventurous – Marx also sees us as bogged down by economic laws which limit and constrain our existence. Marx’s answer to this paradox is the objective study of economic and social circumstances and the identification of the ways out of our oppression that society itself offers. Here social revolution presents itself as the only satisfactory path out of the present limitations of the human condition. Revolution arises from our real circumstances and our conditions and it corresponds to our romantic and promethean yearnings.29 Marx believes that Hegel can be included amongst those philosophers who fail to take into account ‘real interests’ in presenting a view of history. Perhaps for Marx also Hegel is the model representative of the view of history as subject to ‘extra-superterrestial’ guidance. But Marx seems to misread Hegel here. Hegel’s superterrestial spirit may indeed have transcendent qualities, but for Hegel it is supposed to emerge in the immanent working of social and political processes. A Hegelian might well say that spirit is not more appended to actual history than Marx’s conception of communism. Marx’s account of the necessary economic development of the human race is as much a theory of history as Hegel’s account of the evolution of spirit. But Marx is very good at making his account of history sound like the real thing: But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of the process of his creation. 30 There seems to be a confusion of the moral and the empirical here in Marx’s assessment of history. Marx seems to be running together in this

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instance his desire to see the path of human events as following a progressive pattern with the observed course of events. Many observers wish to see events separately from any pattern. Marx’s supposition about history is very interesting and has, of course, been extremely influential but it suffers from the fact that Marx wants to see it as something more than a supposition. Marx shares with Hegel the desire to see his philosophy of history as reality itself. As he and Engels put it in the German Ideology: The premisses from which we start are not arbitrary; they are no dogmas but rather actual premisses from which abstraction can be made only in imagination. They are real individuals, their actions, and their material conditions of life, those which they find existing as well as those which they produce through their actions. These premisses can be substantiated in a purely empirical way.31 In their view of history Marx and Engels are both monists and dogmatists. They are monists in that they believe that one principle can be seen as underlying human history, namely, material production, and they are dogmatists in believing that they solely give the correct outline of that principle. Marx’s genius led him to an intellectual arrogance, an arrogance which he shared with Hegel. Neither is prepared to see their point of view as one possible interpretation of the world. They like to appropriate all points of view within their own. Ultimately such philosophical imperialism is a possible recipe for intellectual stagnation. Fukuyama also sees Marx as beguiled by the Kantian and Hegelian idea of a universal history. According to Fukuyama, Marx: appropriated large parts of the Hegelian system for his own purposes. Marx accepted from Hegel a view of the fundamental historicity of human affairs, the notion that human society evolved over the course of time from primitive social structures to more complex and highly developed ones. He agreed as well that the historical process is fundamentally dialectical, that is, that earlier forms of political and social organization contain certain internal ‘contradictions’ that become evident over time and led to their downfall and replacement by something higher. 32 But some questions can be raised as to whether or not Fukuyama is correct in suggesting that ‘Marx shared Hegel’s belief in the possibility of

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the end of history’. It is doubtful Marx ‘foresaw a final form of society that was free from contradictions, and whose achievement would terminate the historical process’.33 Marx does seem to envisage an end to history in the sense that history, as Fukuyama notes, may have some immanent purpose, but Marx does not seem to think that realising this purpose brings an end to history. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx claims that ‘communism is the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development’.34 Marx seems to envisage human history developing a purpose taking it beyond communism, so communism represents the object of history for now. The Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy seems to corroborate this view: No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present. 35 Something new decidedly happens with the end of the capitalist era and the transition to communism. But this decisive break does not represent the end of history: The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation. 36 Marx seems to regard human history up to the present as a kind of collective nursery ground for humanity. It is a period of our enforced immaturity, leading up to a point where we can finally break free from our domination by economic forces. According to Marx the immanent purpose of history is to change the human individual from the object of development into its subject:

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In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! 37 As with Hegel, human freedom is the inner objective of history. Unlike Hegel though Marx does not equate this freedom with the enjoyment of liberal rights within a free market economy, but rather with their transcendence.

Conclusion Hegel’s and Marx’s theories of history, tied as they are to their (albeit opposed) teleological notions of an end to history, are locked into an unjustifiable optimism. For Hegel and Marx things have to be getting better. This enforced progressivism rules out for them at least four other conceivable alternative views of the nature of historical development. They are: (1) A cyclical view of history which regards periods of progress as matched by periods of decline, similar to that suggested by Plato in the Republic. Here social and political forms give way to their opposites which in turn pave the way for the reappearance of earlier forms. Another example of this kind of view is Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence. (2) A regressive view of history. Everything here would be seen from the standpoint of its potential and inevitable decline. This would represent an eternal falling away from an earlier more perfect form of society. The Biblical notion of original sin is somewhat similar to this. We are destined always to repeat our fall from grace. In the strict sense a continuous regress would seem impossible. We cannot forever burn up our social and political resources. (3) A qualified progressive view of history. Here progress is regarded as possible (and as perhaps having occurred in some instance in the past) but not as necessary and therefore inevitable. In this view human

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choice plays an important part in determining outcomes. Improvement would seem as the result of rational and prudent courses of action being taken and certain dangers avoided. In this view of history regress would always remain a possibility and not simply a temporary setback. A lack of will and circumstances might combine to make improvement continuously extremely difficult, if not impossible. From this standpoint, accidents and luck might be seen as helping or hindering advance. (4) There is a final possibility which cannot be wholly disregarded. This is the doomsday scenario. From this standpoint improvement might be regarded as necessary but impossible. It might be that to survive human society has to alter, but the alteration required is too dramatic and too demanding. Here the choices might be so limited that survival could be brought only at the price of progress. This would represent the end of history in its worst sense. None of these four possibilities can entirely be ruled out (although there are logical problems with the second.) Some of them seem to me to be highly unattractive and, if possible, to be avoided. But I should not like to say with certainty in advance that they can be avoided. They are possible futures for mankind. But Hegel and Marx in their theories of history do seem completely to rule them out. Possibly this is part of the attraction of the Hegelian–Marxist doctrine of history. Perhaps the doctrine stops us thinking about what might be some of the worst consequences of our behaviour as a species. We can find reassurance in the Hegelian–Marxist doctrine when things appear to be going badly. But this reassurance might be bought at the price of soberly considering what we might as individuals be able to do in the present to improve our condition. Hegel with the notion of Geist and Marx with the notion of the revolutionary proletariat take responsibility for the future away from individuals and place it in the hands of entities which are seemingly beyond their control. In almost the most technical of senses Hegel’s and Marx’s accounts of the end of history are irresponsible ones.

Notes 1 ‘At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’ K. Marx,

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. M. Dobb, tr. S. W. Rayazanskaya (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 21. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Millar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 443. Compare L. P. Hinchman, Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1984), pp. 63–9, with S. Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 15–16. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel, 20 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 460; M. Inwood, ed., Hegel Selections (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 441. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Books, 1956), p. 457; Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, 12, p. 540. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 56. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 57. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 99. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 107. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 20. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 25. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 439. See L. Althusser, For Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), Ch. 2, ‘On the Young Marx’, pp. 49–86. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ed. D. J. Struik, tr. M. Milligan (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), p. 135. K. Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 426. K. Marx, Writings of the Young Marx, p. 433. P. Saunders, Capitalism: A Social Audit (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), p. vii. P. Saunders, Capitalism, p. 3. P. Saunders, Capitalism, p. 5. P. Saunders, Capitalism, p. 7. P. Saunders, Capitalism, p. 9. As for instance when he says in the Preface to the first German edition of Capital: ‘I paint the capitalist and landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and classinterests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.’ Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, ed. F. Engels, tr. S. Moore and E. Aveling (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p. 10. As John Torrance puts it, in the early 1840s Marx was exposed to and adopted ‘the myth of political revolution. . . . This made Marx accept uncriticized assumptions containing illusions specific to this myth; that his new scientific perspective was limited by the revolutionary horizon as that of political economy had been limited by the bourgeois horizon; and that this false consciousness was to be a source of ideological Marxism.’ J. Torrance, Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 409.

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24 K. Marx, The Civil War in France, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (London & Moscow: Progress Publishers & Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 311. 25 For a useful discussion of Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom see G. Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 26 Marx and Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, p. 63. 27 L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 408–16. 28 Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3, p. 412. 29 Kolakowski’s conclusion is interesting: ‘Marx was convinced that he had synthesized all the intellectual values available to him in a single picture. In the light of his own conception of his work, such questions as whether he was a determinist or a voluntarist, or whether he believed in historical laws or human initiative, have no meaning. Ever since, as a student at Berlin, he came to the conclusion that with Hegel’s help he had overcome the Kantian dualism between what is and what ought to be, he was in an intellectual position which enabled him to reject such questions.’ Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3, p. 416. 30 K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 145. 31 K. Marx, Writings of the Young Marx, pp. 408–9. 32 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 64–5. 33 Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 65. 34 K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 146. 35 K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 21. 36 Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, pp. 21–2. 37 K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, in One Volume (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 324–5.

10 Hegel and Marx on International Relations David Boucher

Modern international relations theory has recently taken a normative turn and begun seriously to explore the place of ethics in the relations among states. Such theorists at once reject what was the dominant aspiration in various guises in the discipline, namely the search for objective explanation, and deny the Realist contention that talk of morality and ethical principles disguises the underlying motivations, namely power and security. If ethical principles are to play a role in international relations, then they must have some basis of justification. A number of theorists have sought to identify the source of the principles of international ethics in either cosmopolitanism or communitarianism, while suggesting at the same time that these two categories adequately conceptualise normative thinking in international relations since the time of Kant. There are, of course, different types of cosmopolitanism and Marx is typically identified as one of its main variants along with utilitarianism and Kantianism. Similarly, communitarianism comes in different guises, but Hegel is exemplified as its principal exponent. In order to dissociate the broader implications of modern communitarianism from the specifically Hegelian and idealist versions such international relations theorists as Mervyn Frost and Chris Brown prefer to use the term constitutive theory.1 Both authors jettison Hegelian metaphysics and present their own ideas in a secular Hegelianism. Given Marx’s denial of state centrality in world politics, his denunciation of inequality and injustice, and the implicit rejection of the established world order in preference for radical change or revolution, Marx has to a large extent, until relatively recent times, been relegated to the margin of the modern international relations community. His main contribution to international relations theory has been to contemporary analyses of imperialism with their emphasis upon the capitalist world 217

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structure, structural power, and the structural instruments of oppression exercised in the context of the centre/periphery relationship. 2 The main difference between Marx’s conception of colonialism and the theories of imperialism of modern neo-Marxists is that on the whole Marx, although contemptuous of the particular acts of capitalist colonialists in exploiting the Orient, believed that in the long term capitalist intervention had the effect of raising barbarous societies to the level of history and facilitating progress towards socialism and communism. When looked at in terms of the categories of communitarianism and cosmopolitanism the theories of Hegel and Marx appear starkly antithetical. In the first section of this essay I present their ideas as representative of communitarianism and cosmopolitanism in international relations. If we drop these categories, however, and focus not upon the end result of a state-centric international system or a cosmopolitan stateless world, but instead upon the way they each view ethical principles in international relations as historically evolving, we see that they are not the polar opposites that they appear to be. In the second section I try to reconcile their theories by emphasising the historically developing nature of their conceptions of international ethics.

Hegel’s Constitutive Theory of International Ethics In brief, Hegel’s constitutive theory traces the development of the selfconsciousness of the individual through the family, civil society and the state. The ethical family provides the loving community within which personality can first emerge. Based as it is on unconditional love it can only provide the starting point for individuality. In civil society the individual takes responsibility for setting and achieving his own goals in the sphere of private property and the market economy sustained by political institutions. In this sphere individuals are contestants in competition with each other and experience the law not as of their own making or a reflection of their own will, but instead as an external constraint. The state for Hegel is the realisation of Spirit and the ‘ethical totality’ in which ‘the individual has and enjoys his Freedom’. 3 The individual’s freedom is not fully realised, however, until the state itself is recognised by other states. Colonial status denies this recognition and the people are subject to an external power and thus fail to achieve full freedom. It is, for Hegel, with the state that world history must concern itself. For Hegel the individual can fulfil himself as a moral person only within the state. Freedom is manifest in the state and through the state

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individuals know themselves as free.4 Furthermore, however, it is only in the state that the person attains complete recognition and the full realisation of his individuality. It is Hegel’s theory of individuality, which for him is a technical term, that enables us to elucidate why he believed the international community was necessarily one in which states were the principal actors, and why war had an integral role to play in relations among states, in the ethical development of the individual, and in consolidating the inner strength of the state. Like the individual person, the sovereignty of the state must possess self-certainty and exists ‘only as subjectivity’. The truth of subjectivity and of personality can be realised only as a subject and person. The individuality of the state is manifest in the individual person of the constitutional monarch. 5 In an allusion to Kant, Hegel contends that princes and their cabinets are less likely to be swayed by enthusiasms and passions than the people. In other words, Hegel is intimating that to place one’s hope in a republican form of government to eliminate war and establish perpetual peace must be forlorn.6 The sovereign as the manifestation of the individuality of the state retains sole responsibility for its relations with other states, each of which is a being for itself independent of the others. This being for itself consists in the independence of the state and ‘is the primary freedom and supreme dignity of the nation’. 7 In other words recognition and hence full self-consciousness depends upon the existence of other states. Each state ‘has a primary and absolute entitlement to be a sovereign and independent power in the eyes of others, i.e. to be recognised by them’.8 This formal entitlement is in itself abstract. Formal recognition depends upon the internal constitution of the state, and external perception of it. Recognition, as for the individual person, entails struggle. To wage war against a state implies that recognition is being denied it; but in fact the very opposite is the case. By waging war the existence of a state is being acknowledged, and full recognition is conferred when peace is finally agreed. 9 What, then, is required if states are to afford each other mutual recognition and acknowledge their equal right to exist? Hegel’s answer is that there must be a family of states such as that which had come into being in modern Europe. We more often than not think of Hegel as the philosopher of the state, but in his philosophy of history what he is really talking about is state systems. World history is the history of nationstates, and these states are characterised in each epoch by a different self-conception which manifests itself as a national principle evident in the social structure, and particularly in the constitution, of designated world-historical peoples. What Hegel is talking about is not particular

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nation-states as such embodying the world-spirit but typically systems of states, including those of the Oriental world, particularly China, India, Persia and Egypt, Greece and Rome, but in his own day of course the state system of the Germanic, or northern European peoples. This system of states, although politically fragmented, constituted one people. Within this system a balance of power was maintained to protect any one of them from ‘the violence of the powerful’, and a diplomacy emerged ‘in which all the members of the great European system, however distant, felt an interest in that which happened to any one of them’.10 It is true to say that a states-based system of international relations is the necessary precipitate of Hegel’s philosophy. He says unequivocally, that ‘the state is an individual, and negation is an essential component of individuality. Thus, even if a number of states join together as a family, this league, in its individuality, must generate opposition and create an enemy.’ 11 For states to renounce their individuality and self-awareness in order to create a new totality for Hegel is almost unthinkable. 12 The state, as we have seen, is the manifestation, or the actuality, of Spirit. In this respect it is ‘the absolute power on earth’.13 Although states are individuals, they are not like private persons. Each state is sovereign and completely independent. Private individuals are interdependent in innumerable ways, while the state is largely a self-sustaining whole whose needs can be satisfied internally. In their relations with each other every state is a particular will. The rights of the state are not actualised as a universal will, as those of private persons are in the constitutional powers exercised over them. The rights of a state are actualised in its particular will. The state as a concrete whole has for the content of its particular will its own interest and welfare, which cannot be superseded as those of the individual person can by consciousness of belonging to a greater whole. Its own welfare ‘is the supreme law for a state in its relations with others’.14 This means that in making treaties or in justifying wars the principles that govern the state are not abstract and universal, but actual conditions which affect or threaten its welfare. The justification of the welfare of the state is different from that of the individual person whose existence is abstract in the absence of the ethical life of the state. Hegel argues that: The immediate existence [Dasein] of the state as ethical substance, i.e. its right, is directly embodied not in abstract but in concrete existence [Existenz], and only this concrete existence, rather than any of those many universal thoughts which are held to be moral


commandments, can be the principle of its own action and behaviour. 15 Because a state is the determinant of its own interest and welfare, no abstract principles can dictate which among its extensive relations it will be most sensitive about and most easily take to be injured or in breach of agreement. The stronger its individuality the more likely a state is to take offence at any affront to what it determines as its honour. Where each state views itself as right, there is in international relations a clash of rights because no universal principle can be applied to adjudicate their actual claims. The appointment of arbitrators or mediators is contingent and rests upon the acquiescence or agreement of the particular wills in dispute. In the absence of agreement between sovereign states whose individual wills conflict, war is the means by which disputes are settled.16 European states constrain each other not only in the declaration of war, but also in its conduct once war has been declared. Like Burke, Hegel has a great deal of faith in the regulatory capacity of custom in international relations. It is not a cosmopolitan ideal or principle that impresses itself upon the individual European states to act humanely in their relations with each other, but primarily their own national customs universalised. It is these, and not international law as such, that constitute ‘the universal aspect of behaviour which is preserved under all circumstances’.17 Hegel suggests in fact that, generally speaking, ‘international law rests on social usage’. 18 Hegel did believe that international law was obligatory even though it did not have the characteristics of positive state law. It is clear that international law does not have the ethical status of civil law. Civil law expresses the general will of the community, whereas international law expresses the agreement of particular wills on their immediate common welfare. Whereas Hegel was contemptuous of any political theory that based the state upon contract, international law for him did in fact ‘possess the formal nature of contracts in general’.19 International law does not, however, possess the legal status of civil contracts, nor of civil law. The absence of a legitimately constituted sovereign body to guarantee the rights and obligations established under civil contract means that in the international sphere the rights that states derive from their agreements fall ‘short of true actuality’. 20 Civil contracts are directly related to ‘the individuality and dependence’ of citizens and do not constitute the model by which ‘absolutely independent and free nations’ are to be regulated. 21 Hegel’s opinion of the ethical and legal

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status of inter-state agreements is betrayed in his reference to them as ‘so-called international law’.22 In other words, international law is not properly law. It is the expression of several particular wills, and not the result of a general will. In so far as international contracts fall short of actuality, to what extent are they obligatory? Power may be lacking to enforce international obligations, but this does not mean that there are no obligations. It means that they are unenforceable should a state decide to renege on them. The obligation remains irrespective of the power to enforce its discharge. 23 The foundation of this obligation has two sources. First, national customs – a nation’s sense of propriety and decency – will be universalised and held up by it as humanitarian principles.24 Mutual recognition entails mutual respect. Agreements are of little use per se unless the will exists to keep them. Bernard Bosanquet articulates better what Hegel’s theory implies. The state is responsible for organising the moral organism in which the conditions for the good life of its citizens are sustained. Our very conceptions of humanitarianism and universal principles, in the absence of an international general will, are learnt and imparted within the social, cultural and ethical fabric of the advanced civilised nations. It is the nation from which the ideals emanate, and which constitutes the principal instrument through which to contribute to humanity. Patriotism and humanitarianism are therefore not opposed.25 The second source of international obligation is the code of customary conduct which will have emerged as a result of the historical relationships into which states have entered, and of the co-operative endeavours that are integral to them, the terms of which may sometimes find formal expression in international law. The fact that there is no determinate system of justice in the international sphere, does not necessarily mean that there is no morality. It should be remembered that for the most part the morality of citizens is not enforced by law, and that the constraints upon conduct are voluntarily subscribed to, at the risk of nothing more than being rebuked, frowned upon, or sent to Coventry, should one transgress. The conduct of citizens in relation to each other is informed by common sympathies and practices that give rise to moral constraints. Although states, unlike citizens, do not belong to an organised whole, they do share common experiences and sympathies that constitute the common Sittlichkeit in which obligations arise, and which, in the words of Viscount Haldane, ‘it is “bad form” or “not the thing” to disregard’. 26 This is not a dispute about whether war brings beneficial or negative results. In this respect it is not a consequentialist


argument. Constraints in war, and the requirements of international law, arise between two or more autonomous states because of mutual recognition and respect, and not because there is a cosmopolitan morality impelling them. As Janna Thompson observes, Hegel’s theory is a radical rejection of universal morality and an assertion of the ‘moral primacy of the community’.27 Hegel never saw active service in a war, but during most of his life European states were at war with each other. On the principle that the actual is the rational war, like everything else, has to be accounted for. Unlike Rousseau, who objected to the Abbé de St. Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace on the grounds that it was desirable but impracticable, Hegel objected to Kant’s On Perpetual Peace because it was both undesirable and impracticable. War, for Hegel, is by no means the ‘normal’ condition of relations between states. Should a clash of rights precipitate armed conflict between states, their shared sense of decency and humane conduct serves to regulate the prosecution of war. War is taken by all parties to be something which ought, once it has started, to come to an end, and therefore all avenues that may facilitate this end should be exempt from attack. Hegel in fact wanted to maintain a clear distinction between civil and military relations. In war the domestic institutions of the state, family life and private individuals ought to be allowed to go about their business unimpeded by a foreign enemy. In this respect Hegel somewhat naively suggests that: ‘Modern wars are accordingly waged in a humane manner, and persons do not confront each other in hatred.’28 It is important to bear in mind that nothing Hegel says is a justification of any particular war. Each war has its own mundane causes arising from each state’s conception of its welfare. Hegel is offering a philosophical explanation and justification of war which, as we have seen, postulates the necessity for struggle in achieving state recognition and individuality, or rational self-consciousness. Furthermore, in sustaining its individuality the state may be required to prosecute its own case by means of warfare when its rights clash with those of another state. This is only one side of Hegel’s explanation of war. The other side is concerned with identifying the importance of war in cementing the relationship between the individual person and the state, and in developing and sustaining the moral integrity of its institutions. It is to this second side that we must now turn; that is, to the internal health of the state as a factor in its relations with other states. The risking of one’s life for the state in war serves a number of crucial ethical purposes. First, it impels the individual citizen to recognise and

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acknowledge that his interests and desires as a member of civil society are only transitory. His own family and civil or economic life depend upon the existence and maintenance of the state. The call upon citizens to make the ultimate sacrifice does not have as its end the protection of the life and property of the citizen. This would be to conceive of the state, as Hobbes does, as a civil society. It is absurd to understand war as the sacrifice of that which war is supposed to safeguard. The individual person who realises himself only as the citizen of a state is subordinate to the ethical whole, and must dedicate himself to it. The state is a higher individuality in relation to which the rights and interests of individual persons are only transitory. In consequence, the individual has a duty to lay down his life for the state ‘to preserve this substantial individuality’.29 It is the realisation of belonging to a greater whole whose preservation is paramount, and which incorporates and transcends the particular wills of its members, that constitutes the ethical moment of war. During long periods of peace, Hegel believes in contrast with Kant, citizens of a state begin to delude themselves into thinking that the material values of civil society are paramount. This is because during times of peace the state makes few calls upon its citizens, and their private activities can be pursued in relative seclusion. Perpetual peace would lead to the pursuit of individual interest at the expense of the common good. The second ethical function of war, and following directly from the first, is to reinforce the idea that the unity has greater significance than the parts. War, then, as well as impelling the individual person’s acknowledgement of belonging to a wider whole, provides the impetus for greater social cohesion: ‘in war the power of the association of all with the whole is in evidence; this association has adjusted the amount which it can demand from individuals, as well as the worth of what they may do for it of their own impulse and their own heart.’30 Risking one’s life for the state is of far greater significance than merely fearing death. Courage in the service of the state is the true valour of a nation in which the individual ‘counts as one among many’.31 Valour, then, is ‘not so much the deed of a particular person as that of a member of a whole’. 32 In addition, the propensity for self-interest to become translated into corruption during prolonged periods of peace is mitigated by war. As a result of war internal dissension’s may evaporate and the nation emerge strengthened. 33 War does not merely exist, it is actual; that is, it has a place in the rational development of individual self-consciousness, as Hegel describes


it in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and in the development of the state, as espoused in the Philosophy of Right. Whereas empirically the occasion and justification of war may be fortuitous and contingent, or accidental, philosophically war has a rationale consistent with the development of World Spirit.

Marx’s Cosmopolitanism Marx and Engels did not address themselves directly to formulating a fully developed theory of international relations. They did, however, write a great deal about the propensity for capitalism to develop world wide markets; on specific incidents and events involving colonies and their colonisers; on the ideas of a nation and class; and in addition, Engels was fascinated with military history. It is from these sources that we are able to construct the theory that is only intimated in their work. Furthermore, if Marx is a cosmopolitan thinker, there must be some firmer basis for a world community than class cohesiveness. After all, the community towards which he looks forward is classless. What sort of cosmopolitanism is Marx advocating? Broadly speaking, cosmopolitanism can be distinguished into two types: institutional cosmopolitanism and moral cosmopolitanism. Communitarian critics of cosmopolitanism usually launch their attacks on the institutional kind, arguing for the necessity of the concepts of national community and national identity.34 Although the implications of a classless and stateless world seem to be the unity of the human race in a moral rather than institutional cosmopolitanism, it is by no means inevitable in the works of Marx and Engels that nations and communities will disappear. In a letter to Bebel, for example, Engels wrote: ‘as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore propose to replace state everywhere by “community”.’35 Kubálková and Cruickshank also find it difficult to accept that after the revolution there would be no division of the world into communities. They point out that Marx, in Das Capital, vol. III, acknowledged the possibility of there being variations in the way in which the common mode of production exhibited itself in surface manifestations. Similarly, they contend that Engels even allowed for minimum inequalities to surface in the conditions of life from one community to another. 36 What has to provide the basis of Marx’s cosmopolitanism is his notion of human essence. Marx does have a notion of what he calls ‘species-being’. Species-being is the essence of life and finds expression when a person is in harmony with nature. The person expresses this

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species-being in the things that he or she makes, whether they are artistic creations or products for consumption. When the capitalist takes away the object of labour and gives wages in return, the labourer becomes alienated from his or her species-being. This process, Marx suggests, undermines the labourer’s superiority over animals and transforms it into an inferior relationship. People are deprived of nature, the very thing to which they stand in an intimate relation. Nature is, for Marx, the ‘inorganic body’ of the person; it is that which is formed and transformed as an expression of his or her species-being. As Marx suggests: ‘A direct consequence of man’s alienation from the product of his work, from his life’s activity, and from his species-existence, is the alienation of man from man.’37 Marx’s notion of ‘species-being’ or ‘species-existence’ implies that there is an ideal of humanity from which man has become alienated. He seems to have a universal and transcendental idea of what man should be in opposition to what man had become at that time. Bertell Ollman, Norman Geras and Lawrence Wilde have all argued that Marx does have a conception of human essence, in relation to which the concept of alienation has to be understood. 38 For Wilde, this essence consists in that which differentiates human beings from animals; that is, their capacity for creative production that can be distinguished and identified only in its manifestations in history. This essence is one which changes with history in that the capacity for creativity finds new expression as circumstances change. The human essence, for example, can become manifest in political activity, but the origin and genesis of the manifestation will be more deeply rooted in civil society, and in particular in the organisation of production. Alienation on this interpretation is the alienation of the human essence of creative activity that occurs within the process of commodity production.39 The existence of a cosmopolitan community based on this idea of human essence is impeded not only by alienation, which is a consequence of being at the mercy of impersonal structures and forces of human creation, but also by exploitation of one group by another through the control of the labour power of another for profit, and estrangement of communities or nations from each other because of suspicion and hostility. Capitalism was the first truly international mode of production, which broke down national barriers to the exploitation of a world market. The impetus for such expansion is the competition among capitalists for resources, cheap labour and investment opportunities.40 Conflict between capitalists is inherent in the system. Marx often refers to this competition as war. In order to survive the cyclical patterns of boom


and recession capitalists have desperately to search for ways to cut costs and open up new markets. Capitalist international expansionism at the same time gave rise to an international working class. The war among capitalists is mitigated by their united or common class interest, conflict against the proletariat.41 Marx and Engels were not concerned with globalisation developed by relations among states, although they were aware of the importance of such relations in the past and of conquest in creating larger political entities. Globalisation under capitalism, however, was of much greater significance. 42 Of all the modes of production to emerge prior to socialism, only capitalism had the potential and capacity to encompass the whole world in its system of productive relations. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels argued that under capitalism a world market had been established which had given considerable impetus to the development of communications, commerce and navigation.43 Because of the exploitation of the world market production and consumption in each country had taken on a cosmopolitan character. As Marx says: ‘In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.’44 Capitalist values became universalised over the whole world and effectively broke down national barriers. The continuous improvements in the instruments of production along with the enhanced means of communication gave capitalism an irresistible impetus which dragged even barbarous nations into the sphere of civilisation. Marx argues that: While on the one hand capital must thus seek to pull down every local barrier to commerce, i.e. to exchange, in order to capture the whole world as its market, on the whole, on the other hand it strives to destroy space by means of time, i.e. to restrict to a minimum the time required for movement from one place to another. The more developed capitalism was, and thus the more extensive the market through which it circulates and which constitutes the spatial route of its circulation, the more it will aspire to greater extension in space for its market, and thus to greater destruction of space by time.45 Capitalism compelled all nations to comply with bourgeois methods of production and to adopt bourgeois values: ‘In one word, it creates a world after its own image.’46 National self-sufficiency and local parochialism are replaced by international interdependence. This universalisation of capitalist values was achieved at both the material and intellectual levels. Local literature, he maintained, gave way to an international literature.

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Just as the mode of production to which the bourgeoisie was related was universal in its scope, the class which it brought into being, and which would ultimately destroy it, was itself truly universal. The state itself, which was so central in the international system for Hegel, was described by Marx and Engels as an instrument of the ruling class employed to regulate competition among themselves and to oppress the proletariat.47 This does not mean that they believed that it was consciously employed in this manner, merely that it is an expression of class interest, no doubt mistakenly believed by the bourgeoisie to represent the interests of all. At other times the state was described by Marx and Engels as constituting a bureaucracy with its own interests attempting to alleviate and mediate class conflict in order to sustain its own power.48 Either way, the state was something to which the proletariat owed nothing more than a strategic allegiance. The primary loyalty of the proletarian was to his class, rather than to the nation or the state. The sufferings of the proletariat were universal, and its emancipation must also be universal.49 The conditions of subjection were the same everywhere under capitalism and in consequence the worker had been stripped of every vestige of national character.50 In their struggles against the bourgeoisie, the proletarians of all countries had a common interest independent of national ties. 51 Even though the aim was to rid the world of class conflict, the level at which the struggle took place between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was at first the national level: ‘The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.’52 Modern nationalism was for Marx and Engels bourgeois. It was the territorial consolidation by the bourgeoisie of their economic social and political power under the auspices of the sovereign nation-state.53 Along with the consolidation of capitalist power the modern nation-state and a national proletariat were necessary, but nevertheless transitory phases in the development of history. Although the emphasis and the force of the argument changes after the nationalist revolutions of 1848, Marx was consistent in maintaining the universal character of capitalism which could not be constrained by national boundaries, and the universal interest of the proletariat. Only under capitalism was this universality possible. As nationalist aspirations became stronger as a force which simply had to be reckoned with, both Marx and Engels had to acknowledge that national self-determination was indispensable to the development of socialism. Their view was consequentialist in the sense that if a certain


development, including nationalism, contributes to the development of history and not to its regression, that is, if the overall consequences are favourable, then it is to be valued and encouraged. 54 Initially, Marx and Engels were on the whole hostile to nationalist movements because they were potentially retrogressive and retarded the development and demise of capitalism. Initially, for example, Marx believed that Irish nationalism would inhibit the growth of capitalism both in England and Ireland. He urged Irish workers to join the Chartist cause which he thought would perpetrate a workers’ revolution and simultaneously liberate Ireland. 55 With the increasing number of Irish emigrants forced by famine to seek their fortune in English cities an antagonism arose between English and Irish workers. Ireland was firmly placed on the British political agenda in 1867 with the resurgence of Fenianism, and more importantly, nor did it any longer appear a progressive stance for Marx and Engels. They came to believe that Irish nationalism could be used to undermine British aristocratic landed interests in both Ireland and Britain by breaking down the last remnants of feudalism. 56 Nationalist movements, then, could be commensurate with the development of socialism. If nationalist movements were progressive, that is, if they promoted the development of socialism, they could be accepted. If they were regressive, that is, likely to inhibit the growth of socialism, they had to be condemned. The nation provided a suitable context for generating capitalist growth and that is why both Marx and Engels supported German and Italian unification. As Petrus contends, Marx and Engels ‘supported national self-determination under particular conditions but never as a binding principle’. 57 Oppressed nations had first to achieve national liberation before the proletariat could liberate themselves from the bourgeoisie. With Marx materialism rather than nationalism provided the basis for understanding societies, and class became the essential form of group cohesion for analysis. Conflict between classes, rather than between states, constituted the central focus for Marx’s conception of history. As Williams succinctly puts it: ‘Marx sees politics not from the perspective of one national state but from the perspective of a progressive view of history with the international working class as its agent.’58 Whereas the categories of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism may have a certain rhetorical force, they are highly misleading as rigorous concepts with which to explore international relations theory. Kant, for example, is the exemplar of cosmopolitanism, yet his theory of international relations incorporates a very slender element of cosmopolitanism. His theory is based upon three types of right being simultaneously

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operational. First, constitutional right, that is republican governments internal to states; second, international right, that is the rights that states have in their relations with each other; and third, cosmopolitan right, which essentially amounts to the right of hospitality as one human to another. Marx’s version of cosmopolitanism is one in which the universal moral community has little or no place until the end of a process considerably enhanced and facilitated by the particularistic circumstances of capitalism. Communitarianism is said to hold that the individual is fulfilled within the states and that nothing more could be added to the human consciousness of freedom by forms of association higher than the state. But this, of course, is not even Hegel’s position. Recognition by other states in the society of Germanic or Northern European states is a necessary requirement of self-consciousness of human freedom. The British idealists went even further and suggested that the moral community could increasingly be extended even beyond the state, a position they found both desirable and possible.

Historically Developing Criterion If we change the terms of reference and talk in terms of universalism and particularism, we find that both Hegel’s communitarianism and Marx’s cosmopolitanism have elements of both. O’Neill suggests, for example, that ‘Hegel embeds the stages of particularity in the history of more inclusive universal reason.’59 Marx, on the other hand, while holding some notion of a universal human essence traces its manifestations in the particularities of distinct historical epochs. They both see history as the gradual unfolding of freedom in the world. They are both historicists but not relativists. Both have an ideal of human nature in that humans are deemed by both to have a capacity to attain freedom, and both believe that the historical process in which the stages of attainment are manifest reveal not one universal nature, but changing natures constituted by the historical conditions. Each of the stages is an inadequate attainment of freedom. Because each has the idea of human freedom as his guiding principle each is able to make judgements about the merits of one epoch over another. For Hegel moral duty and moral standards, apart from the historical circumstances of social and political life in relation to which they developed, are mere abstractions. Practical principles arise in connection with the activities of individuals in their social and political relations. 60 It is only within an ethical order, or ethical actuality, that individuals can exercise their right to follow their subjective consciences.61 Within


such an order or community the determination of one’s moral duty is relatively easy. The person ‘must simply do what is prescribed, expressly stated, and known to him within his situation’. 62 Understanding practical and rational principles is not a matter of explaining their origin. The historical origin of something may be very different from its philosophical significance. The reason why an institution or practice originally arose may be very different from its philosophical significance. 63 In other words, we want to know, not the origin, but the process by which our institutions and principles come to be what they are. It is a process of emendation. The beginning cannot explain the end, but the end of the process does explain the beginning. Like Burke, then, Hegel denies the possibility of constructing a politically stable state on abstract a priori principles. In this respect there can be no ideal constitution or political institutions universally applicable irrespective of time and circumstance. A constitution, for example, will reflect the character and development of the self-consciousness of a particular nation, and must therefore be ‘more than a product of thought. Each nation accordingly has the constitution appropriate to itself.’ 64 The same is also true of a nation’s penal code, which Hegel takes to be a ‘product of its time and of the current condition of civil society’.65 It follows, for Hegel, that ‘harsh punishments are not unjust in and for themselves, but are proportionate to the conditions of their time; a criminal code cannot be valid for every age, and crimes are semblances of existence which can meet with greater or lesser degrees of repudiation.’66 The criteria of conduct which states observe in their relations with other states are, like the internal constitution of a state, historically developing. Of all those peoples in antiquity the Greeks and the Jews loved freedom most, but even they did not look upon other peoples as equally worthy of existence. The Greeks viewed other peoples as barbarians, while the Jews simply looked upon non-Jews as other, gentiles. The fact that a consciousness of national individuality was not widespread and that the reciprocal acknowledgement of each people’s right to an essential existence was lacking, Rome had no sense of the equality of the right to exist. After the destruction of Carthage, Rome’s relations with other nations, which had originally been respectful, were characterised by pure force. Although we have a universalist humanitarianism in Marx with an emphasis upon human essence, this essence is really no more than a capacity, which in terms of content and realisation wholly depends upon the historical process. Marx is in fact, along with Hegel, best understood as an exponent of an historically developing international ethics. For

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him human nature is not something given, but develops over time: not in accordance with any absolute standards of morality, but in accordance with the type of society in which people live. In the Communist Manifesto Marx denies any suggestion of an eternal human essence. He says, ‘Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religions and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.’67 He is in fact suggesting that everything is the product of prevailing circumstances, and ultimately of the prevailing mode of production. He does, in fact, explicitly deny that there is a universal human nature. He argues that ‘every century has its peculiar nature, it also produces its peculiar natural men’. 68 History constitutes a continuous transformation of human nature and undermines any claim that a universal morality can reside in an absolute human essence. 69 In the ‘Master–Slave’ section of Hegel’s Phenomenology one of the most important points to arise was that individuality for the slave was attained through work. Individuality was given an enduring and objective form by means of working upon the world. The self-conscious individual was self-realising. Hegel’s significant achievement, in Marx’s view, was to comprehend man’s development as a process. Marx says of Hegel; ‘that he thus grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work.’70 Because individuality entailed a struggle for recognition at the level of consciousness Hegel failed to identify the foundation of self-consciousness in the material conditions of life. In other words, he failed to identify self-consciousness with the prevailing modes of production and the relations to which they gave rise. 71 For Marx, then, it is only by means of the historical process that man becomes a human being. At the outset he was merely a generic being who belonged to a tribe or herd. For Marx the way in which production is organised is of crucial importance because it expressed the life of human beings. The mode of life, as Marx calls it, is what people are. People are what they do; in the ways in which they express themselves, they are themselves. This is a crucial and pivotal aspect of Marx’s thought because here we have the reason economics is important to the understanding of social existence. He summed up his position in the following terms: As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with what they produce, with what they produce and how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions which determine their production. 72


It is true that some of Marx’s characterisations of human action and motivation under capitalism comply with the picture of human nature assumed by Realists. When Marx discusses these characteristics they are clearly specific to capitalism, and therefore historically confined. Marx suggests that capitalism ‘has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”’. 73 It needs to be emphasised, then, that morality is not an absolute standard, but is integrally related to the mode of production and its associated society. Injustice and justice only have meaning and sense relative to the historical epoch and mode of production with which they are associated. Thus slavery is just within the ancient mode of production because it is integral to that system of life. To criticise the Ancient world for being based on slavery is futile. 74 Transactions between people are just when they are the natural consequences of the system of relations of a particular mode of production. Thus because capitalism presupposes the idea of voluntary action in the making of contract: ‘slavery, on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, is unjust; so is fraud in the quality of commodities’. 75 The material conditions of life are the foundation of all other relations including moral relations. When this is translated into the international sphere, as well as defining the relations between individuals, the mode of production defines relations in the international sphere. The types of relations which states enjoy are nothing other ‘than the expression of a particular division of labour. And must not these change when the division of labour changes?’ 76 In the Grundrisse Marx implicitly subscribed to Hegel’s view that history was nothing other than the development of consciousness in the world. History, then, was the progressive revelation of freedom. Its progress was to be distinguished into three phases. The first primitive stage was characterised by relations of dependency, whether within the family, the tribe, or under feudalism by dependency upon a lord. The early forms of social relations were characterised by a herd instinct, or common consciousness. Individuals were barely distinguishable from nature, which appeared to them as an irresistible and mighty force. Progress in freeing themselves from nature and thus developing the capacities that distinguished humans from animals had hardly begun. At this level of consciousness societies were estranged from each other, and each was the source of the others’ difficulties. These primitive communities entered into disputes over land occupation and displaced each other from their territories of settlement. War, for these primitive

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settlements, was a unifying force. Communal labour, which was necessary for occupying the land in order to sustain life, was also necessary to defend that occupation against those who threatened to displace your own community. 77 Any notion of belonging to a common species, or of conceiving larger and inclusive moral orders, was beyond the capacity of these primitive humans. Universal moral ties were inconceivable. These primitive communities were superseded by higher forms of association effected by conquest, in which estrangement between communities was replaced by a hierarchical and more inclusive social structure which gave rise to estrangement between classes. The conquerors dominated the conquered and established new conditions of production, and gave rise to larger inclusive communities. The second form of human association was distinguished by relations of mutual independence. The development of exchange relations which at first arose between communities, was in addition to war the mechanism by which the internal structure of primitive communities became transformed. The money economy transforms the relations of personal dependence into those of an apparent greater independence characterised under capitalism, for example, by freely contracting individuals exchanging labour power and capital. Under conditions of mutual independence productive capacities were enhanced, the human was liberated from nature and learned to dominate it and harness its productive potential. This individual freedom was in fact illusory, and one form of domination was succeeded by another. It was the capitalist structure itself that now dominated individuals by impersonal forces and what appeared to be personal independence simply generated a total dependence of individuals upon a world-wide market. In addition, what appeared to be a universal community of a common species was merely related by money, and not by universal moral ties. The formal freedom and equality that capitalism posits, and effectively negates by class domination, an oppressive division of labour, and the tyranny of the market, are nevertheless of crucial importance in the development of socialism and communism. The third phase of social development realises the freedom and equality that was only potential in the second mode of association. It was a phase in which national and social barriers were surmounted and a truly international and universal moral society established, namely a classless and stateless international society devoid of the forms of alienation to which capitalism gave rise.78


In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx contends that: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. 79 Each successive mode of production marks a stage in the ‘economic development of society’. He distinguishes four such stages before socialism: the Asiatic, Ancient slave economies, feudal serf economies, and the capitalist bourgeois mode of production. There was no suggestion that every society had to follow this line of development, nor that stages could not be skipped. Similarly, remnants of previous stages could coexist with later stages in any one society, and between societies the whole range could be coexistent. Countries in the contemporaneous world exhibited the Asiatic mode of production at the same time as Europe exhibited fully developed capitalism.

Conclusion When the details of Marx’s theory in particular are explored he looks much more like a communitarian or constitutive theorist than a cosmopolitan. The apparent mutual exclusiveness of these categories makes them ill-equipped in terms of which to understand Marx’s ideas. When we use the categories of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism to explore the theories of international relations of Hegel and Marx we find that the states based international system of Hegel with its emphasis upon individuality, recognition and international right stands in marked contrast to Marx’s emphasis upon a stateless international community in which alienation, exploitation and estrangement are overcome in a universal moral community. On the other hand, when we shift the emphasis to particularism and universalism we are able to bring the thought of Hegel and Marx much closer together on the question of international ethics. In both theories ethical constraints in international relations are constituted by the historical process.

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Notes 1 C. Brown, ‘The Ethics of Political Restructuring in Europe, The Perspective of Constitutive Theory’, in Political Restructuring In Europe: Ethical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1994), and M. Frost, Ethics in International Relations: Constitutive Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For discussions of the cosmopolitan/communitarian distinction, see J. Thompson, Justice and World Order (London: Routledge, 1992), and C. Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (London: Harvester, 1992). 2 K. J. Holsti maintains that Marxist philosophy fails to address the central questions in international relations and therefore has little to offer the discipline. K. J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), pp. 61–81. On the other hand, J. Maclean has argued that we can separate Marx’s method from his particular analysis of capitalism, and apply it with profit (metaphorically speaking) to the study of international relations. J. Maclean, ‘Marxism and International Relations: A Strange Case of Mutual Neglect’, Millenium, 17 (1988), pp. 295–320. 3 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. Wood, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), §41. 4 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), §§41–2: ‘For we must understand that the state is the realisation of freedom, i.e. of the absolute end-goal, and that it exists for its own sake. We must understand, further, that all the value that human beings possess, all of their spiritual reality, they have through the state alone’. A. Vincent sums up Hegel’s view in the following terms: ‘We are not just social creatures but state creatures’. A. Vincent, Theories of the State (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 119. 5 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §279. Cf. ibid., §321. 6 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §329A. For a discussion of Hegel’s views on hereditary monarchy see M. Tunick, ‘Hegel’s Justification of Hereditary Monarchy’, History of Political Thought, XII (1991). 7 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §322 and §329. 8 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §331. 9 G. W. F. Hegel, Political Writings, ed. Z. A. Pelczynski, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 201. 10 Hegel, Philosophy of History, pp. 430–2. 11 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §324A. 12 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §322. 13 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §331. Cf. §322. 14 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §336. 15 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §337. 16 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §333–4. 17 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §339A. 18 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §547. 19 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §322. 20 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §547. 21 G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), §124. Hegel also says: ‘international treaties do not have ’the actuality [Wirklichkeit] of actual contracts . . . hence they


22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42

43

44 45 46

should not be viewed according to the way of civil contracts’. Cited by S. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 201. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §547. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §330; ’the relation must always remain one of obligation’: §333; ‘international law remains only an obligation’. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §338. B. Bosanquet, Social and International Ideals (London: Macmillan, 1917), pp. 134 and 16 respectively. Viscount Haldane, Selected Addresses and Essays (London: Murray, 1928), p. 68. Thompson, Justice and World Order, p. 112. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §338. Hegel’s contention that civilian interests and institutions should be excluded from legitimate targets in war should be compared with his views on the extension of the arbitrary powers of the police during times of war. Ibid., §234. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §324 and §70A. Hegel, Political Writings, p.144. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §327. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §328. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §324; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§474–6; G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, tr. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §§545–7; and Hegel, Natural Law, §§93–4. For discussions of this distinction see the chapters by O. O’Neill and C. Beitz in Brown ed., Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives. R. N. Berki, ‘On Marxian Thought and the Problem of International Relations’, World Politics, 24 (1971), p. 85. V. Kubálková and A. A. Cruickshank, Marxism–Leninism and the Theory of International Relations (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 57. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in K. Marx, Writings of the Young Marx, eds L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 295. B. Ollman, Alienation, Marx’s Concept of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); N. Geras, Marx and Human Nature (London: Verso, 1983); L. Wilde, ‘Marx’s Concept of Human Essence and its Radical Critics’, Studies in Marxism, 1 (1994). Wilde, ‘Marx’s Concept of Human Essence and its Radical Critics’, pp. 23–7, and Wilde, Marx and Contradiction, p. 105. Thompson, Justice and World Order, p. 63. Thompson, Justice and World Order, p. 63. A. Linklater, ‘Marxism’, in Theories of International Relations, ed. S. Burchill and A. Linklater, with R. Devetak, M. Paterson and J. True (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 123. K. Marx and F. Engels, Communist Manifesto, in K. Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, in Political Writings Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 69. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 71. D. McLellan, Marx’s Grundrisse (London: Paladin, 1973), p. 141. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 71.

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47 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 69. 48 K. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, tr and ed. J. J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Written in 1843. Also see K. Marx, The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in K. Marx, Surveys From Exile, Vol. 2 of The Political Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). 49 K. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx and Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker, 2nd edition (New York: Norton & Co., 1978), p. 64. 50 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, pp. 77–8. 51 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 79. Also see A. Gilbert, ‘Marx on Internationalism and War’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 7 (1978), p. 348. 52 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 78. 53 J. A. Petrus, ‘Marx and Engels on the National Question’, The Journal of Politics, 33 (1971), pp. 806 and 810. 54 C. Brown, ‘Marxism and International Ethics’ in T. Nardin and D. R. Mapel, eds, Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 230. 55 H. B. Davis, ’Nations, Colonies and Social Classes: the Position of Marx and Engels’, Science and Society, 29 (1965), p. 27. 56 K. Marx and F. Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, ed. R. Dixon (New York, 1972). 57 Petrus, ’Marx and Engels on the National Question’, p. 816; and V. G. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism (London: Arnold, 1974), p. 216. 58 H. Williams, International Relations in Political Theory (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992), p. 120. 59 O. O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 29. 60 Montesquieu is particularly important in this respect. Although he failed to attain the highest philosophical insight, Montesquieu recognised that the laws of the nation were not the result of abstract reason, nor could they be abstracted from experience and raised to the level of universals. Each had to be understood in relation to the whole as systems composing the living individuality of the nation. Hegel says, for example, ‘it was above all Montesquieu who, in his celebrated work, L’Esprit des Lois, focused on and attempted to expand in detail both the thought that laws, including those of civil law in particular, are dependent on the specific character of the state, and the philosophical view that the part should be considered only with reference to the whole’. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §261. Cf. ibid., §3A and Hegel, Natural Law, §§128–9. 61 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §153. 62 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §150. 63 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §3. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, tr. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), §143. 64 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §274. 65 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §218. 66 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §218. 67 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, pp. 85–6.

Hegel and Marx on International Relations 239 68 K. Marx, The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law, in Writings of the Young Marx, p. 97. 69 See E. Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 123; and A. Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 36. 70 Marx, ‘Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy in General’, from the 1844 Manuscripts in Writings of the Young Marx, p. 315. 71 See R. Norman, Hegel’s Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (London: University of Sussex Press, 1976), pp. 52–3. Also see, E. J. Hobsbawm, ed. Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964), pp. 36, 68, and 96. 72 K. Marx, German Ideology in Writings of the Young Marx, p. 409. Cf. K. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Marx and Engels Reader, p. 20. 73 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 70. 74 F. Engels Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Progess Publishers, 1977), p. 223. 75 Cited in A. W. Wood, ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, I (1971–2), p. 255; and N. Geras, ‘The Controversy About Marx and Justice’ in Marxist Theory, ed. A. Callinicos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 211–67. 76 K. Marx, letter to P. V. Annenkov, dated 28 December, 1846 in Marx–Engels Reader, 139. Cf. German Ideology in Writings of the Young Marx, p. 410. 77 Marx Pre-Capitalist Formations, pp. 89 and 92. 78 For illuminating accounts of these three stages in the development of freedom see A. Linklater, Men and Andrew Citizens, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 150–61, and Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 34–45. 79 Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx and Engels Reader, pp. 20–1.

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Index abstraction, 3–5, 10, 81, 105, 108–11, 114, 118, 122–4, 129, 146–9, 151, 160, 211 determinate abstraction, 4, 146, 148, 160 general abstraction, 146–8, 160 real abstraction, 108–11 Adorno, T., 30, 70, 71, 77, 240, 250 alienation, 3, 14–15, 53, 65, 75, 101–3, 142–3, 152, 201, 226, 234–5, 237 Althusser, L., 15–17, 19, 31–2, 85–6, 92, 100, 205, 215, 240 Anderson, K., 240 Aristotle, 34, 41, 90, 128, 134, 203, 209 Aristotelian, 40, 84–5, 90, 92–3, 95, 132, 134–5, 209 Arthur, C., 18–19, 24, 32–3, 92, 99, 102, 105, 126, 193, 240, 249 Austrian School of Economics, 83, 84 Avineri, S., 158, 164, 165, 237 Backhaus, H. G., 127 Bailey, C., 137, 144 Bakunin, M, 45 Bauer, B., 2, 58–9, 63, 135, 144, 240, 250 Trumpet of the Last Judgement, 2, 58 Bernstein, E., 15, 16, 31, 240 Beronovitch, L., 134, 135, 144, 240 Bhaskar, R., 90–1, 101–2, 127, 240–1 Böhm-Bawerk, E., 82–4, 241, 245 Bonar, J., 91, 102, 241 Bosanquet, B., 222, 237, 241 Bottomore, T., 40, 102, 127 Boucher, D., 26, 217 Browning, G. K., 24–5, 131, 144–5, 241 Bukharin, N., 83, 100, 241 Burke, E., 221, 231 Burns, T., 1, 24, 79, 247–8 Caldwell, B., 92, 102, 241 Carchedi, G., 80, 99, 241

Carver, T., 23, 28, 34, 52–3, 55, 79, 98–9, 102–4, 128, 241–3, 248, 252 Chalybäus, H. M., 39 Chapman, J., 44, 54 Chitty, A., 25–6, 166–7, 242 Cohen, G. A., 26, 33, 35, 52, 192–4, 197, 242 Coleridge, S. T., 53–4 Colletti, L., 8, 15–16, 22, 28–9, 31, 33, 85, 100, 102, 130, 242, 248, 251 communism, 142–3, 159, 206–7, 210, 212, 218, 234 communitarianism, 26, 217–18, 229–30, 235 consciousness, 10, 13, 14, 24, 56–9, 63, 66–70, 72–3, 111, 122, 131–2, 134–8, 140–2, 168–76, 179, 189, 200, 202, 204, 206, 215, 218–20, 223–4, 230–3, 235 cosmopolitanism, 26, 217–18, 225, 229–30, 235 critical theory, 12, 30, 42, 69, 70–1, 77, 245 Croce, B., 8, 11, 29, 242 Cruickshank, A. A., 225, 237, 246 Della Volpe, G., 15–16, 31, 242 Democritus, 25, 131–2, 136–41 Democritean, 131, 133, 137–8, 141, 144 determinism, 9, 141 dialectic, 39, 51, 67, 75, 84, 94–7, 106–7, 110–12, 116, 119, 122, 124–6, 129–30, 148 dialectics, 1, 4–12, 14–20, 24, 27, 32–3, 51, 56, 59–61, 63, 66–71, 73–4, 90, 91, 93–8, 103, 110–11, 114, 130, 141, 147–8, 150, 154, 157–8, 170–1, 211 laws of dialectics, 51 'the new dialectics' school, 18–19 the dialectics of nature, 10, 14 253

254

Index

Dobb, M., 81, 96, 99, 103, 215, 242, 248 Dühring, E., 41. See Engels, Anti-Dühring Eliot, G., 44, 54 Elster, J., 35, 51–3, 55, 242 empiricism, 15, 92, 103 empiricist, 94, 127 Engels, F., 6–10, 12, 14–16, 18, 21, 23, 27–9, 34–5, 38–40, 44–5, 51–5, 76–7, 100, 126, 127–8, 144, 162–4, 207, 209, 211, 215–16, 225, 227–8, 237–9, 241–3, 245–50, 252 Anti-Dühring, 6, 28, 41, 239, 242, 248 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 6–7, 28, 77, 242 Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 6, 28, 41, 242 English Hegelians, 44 Enlightenment, 128, 135, 209–10, 215, 245 Epicurus, 25, 131–2, 135–43 on the declination of the atom, 137–9 estrangement. See alienation ethics, 15–16, 26–7, 65, 217–24, 230, 235 Euclid, 81, 84, 95 Farr, J., 88–9, 94, 99, 101, 103–4, 241, 243 Feuerbach, L., 3, 6–8, 10, 27–9, 38–9, 44, 59, 76, 77, 144, 240, 243 Essence of Christianity, 44, 76, 243 Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy, 39 Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 39 Fichte, J. G., 26, 44, 168–72, 178–9, 194, 243 Foundation of Natural Right, 168 Foley, D., 86, 96–7, 100–1, 103, 243 Frankfurt School, 12, 69, 70 Fraser, I., 1, 25, 126, 146

freedom, 12–13, 24, 56, 63–6, 75, 133, 138, 169, 172–80, 182–3, 198, 204, 206, 213, 218–19, 225, 230, 231, 233–4, 236, 239 Freiligrath, F., 44–5, 54 Fukuyama, F., 211, 216 Geras, N., 226, 237, 239, 243 globalisation, 227 Gouldner, A., 243 Gramsci, A., 11–12, 30, 243 Prison Notebooks, 11, 30, 243 Grossmann, H., 84, 100, 243 Habermas, J., 78 Hartmann, K., 33, 79, 99, 244 Hayek, F., 84 Hegel, G. W. F., and communism, 66 and mysticism, 1, 3–4, 11, 18, 23, 32, 106, 107 and pantheism, 38, 57–8 and poverty, 14, 65, 75, 154, 156–7 and relations of recognition, 26 and Sittlichkeit, 162, 163, 164, 165, 222 and the master–slave relation, 174–5, 232 and the Absolute Idea, 18, 108, 118, 120, 129, 203 and the end of history, 64, 202–5, 209, 212, 214 and the struggle for recognition, 13, 174, 232 as a radical, 12, 66, 106 Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 31, 43–4, 53–4, 58, 77, 112, 127–30, 170–1, 201, 238, 244 esoteric and exoteric philosophy of, 2, 65 Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 127, 144, 244 Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 61, 162, 179, 215, 236, 244 Logic, 4, 9, 18–19, 21, 25, 28, 32–3, 41–6, 48–55, 62, 77, 79–80, 98–9, 102, 104, 106, 112, 118,

Index 126–33, 138–9, 141, 144–5, 203, 238, 240–1, 244, 246 on classes, corporations and estates, 65, 155–7, 161, 164 on Mind or Spirit, 10, 24, 56–60, 63–5, 69, 71, 73–4, 111, 118, 124, 156–7, 177–81, 199–205, 210, 214, 218, 220, 225 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, 236–8, 244 Phenomenology of Spirit, 3, 13, 26, 29, 51, 77, 126, 180, 203, 215, 225, 237, 241, 243–4 Philosophy of Mind, 76, 130, 170, 179, 194–5, 236–7, 244 Philosophy of Nature, 144, 201 Philosophy of Right, 13, 26, 39–40, 53, 61, 65–6, 75–7, 118–3, 148, 152, 156, 162–5, 170, 177–80, 195, 203, 225, 236–8, 244, 248, 251 Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 194–5, 244 Political Writings, 236–8, 244 Realphilosophie, 21–2, 33, 130 System of Ethical Life, 161–3, 165, 244 Heilbroner, R., 81, 99, 245 Heller, A., 154, 164 Hess, M., 2 Hilferding, R, 83, 100, 245 Böhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx, 83, 100, 245 historicism, 27, 230 Hollis, M., 92, 102, 245 Hook, S., 27 Horkheimer, M., 30, 69–71, 77, 245 Traditional and Critical Theory, 69 humanism, 15–16, 38, 59, 206 Hyppolite, J., 14, 31, 245 idealism, 1, 3–6, 8–9, 11–23, 26, 32, 39, 60–1, 72, 74, 94–5, 105–8, 111, 124, 126, 198, 200–1, 203, 217 imperialism, 73, 211, 217–18 international relations, 1, 26, 217–18, 220–1, 225, 229, 235–6

255

Jacoby, R., 29, 33, 245 Jaurès, J., 8–9, 29, 245 Kant, I., 16, 61, 63, 76, 87, 100–1, 128, 203, 206, 217, 219, 223–4, 229, 246 Kantian, 101, 128, 211, 216 On Perpetual Peace, 223 Kaufmann, I. I., 5 Kojève, A., 13, 30–1, 246 Kolakowski, L., 28–9, 31, 134–5, 144, 209, 216, 246 Korsch, K., 30, 67, 69, 77, 84, 97, 100, 103, 246 Kubálková, V., 225, 237, 246 Labriola, A., 8, 11, 29, 246 Lafargue, P., 41 Lassalle, F., 130 Lefebvre, H., 14, 31, 246 Leibniz, G. F., 102, 249 Lenin, V. I., 9, 16, 20–1, 29, 31, 33, 62–3, 66, 76, 79, 99, 240, 242, 245–6, 251 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 9, 29, 246 Philosophical Notebooks, 9, 21, 29, 62, 99, 246 Lichtheim, G., 9, 29 linguistic philosophy, 87 Little, D., 88, 91, 99, 100–3, 246 Livergood, N., 143, 145 logic, 42, 50, 59, 75, 82, 90–2, 95–6, 101, 105–8, 111–12, 115–21, 124–6, 128–31, 141–2 dialectical logic, 90, 96 Lucretius, 134, 139 Lukács, G., 9, 10–12, 16, 20–2, 29–30, 33, 60–2, 67, 69–71, 76–7, 97, 103, 158, 165, 246 History and Class Consciousness, 9–10, 22, 29–30, 69, 72, 77, 97, 103, 246 The Young Hegel, 11, 21–2, 29–30, 33, 60–1, 76, 165, 246 MacGregor, D., 6, 21, 23, 28, 33, 77, 163, 246 MacTaggart, J., 43, 54, 246

256

Index

Malthus, T. R., 55, 129 Marcuse, H., 12, 20–2, 29–30, 33, 61–2, 76–7, 245–7 Reason and Revolution, 12, 22, 29–30, 33, 61, 69, 76–7, 246 Marx, K., A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, 25, 51, 194, 215–16, 239, 248 Afterword to Capital volume I, 5, 12, 28, 45, 57, 80–1, 85, 87–8, 93–7, 103, 106, 108 and base and superstructure, 26, 167–8, 192–3, 214, 235 and economic categories, 13, 50, 85, 93, 105–6, 124, 185, 215 and epistemology, 7, 17 and form analysis, 110, 126 and method of inquiry, 5, 80, 82, 88, 91–4 and method of presentation of results, 5, 80, 82–4, 86, 88, 91–7 and money, 18, 32, 41, 47–50, 52, 81, 85, 112–21, 124, 127–8, 151, 156–9, 185–6, 196 and profit, 41–2, 45–7, 49–50, 87, 90–1, 119, 143, 153–4, 208, 226, 236 and reflection theory, 7, 9 and science, 68 and species being, 225–6 and surplus value, 46, 87, 90–1, 120, 123–4, 127, 153 and tautologies in science, 88–9 and the commodity form, 18, 85, 117, 123, 143 and the inversion of Hegel, 7, 11–12, 17–18, 21, 39, 107–8, 110, 124, 129 and the labour theory of value, 82, 88 and the problem of legality, 26, 168, 192 and the rate of profit, 87 and the value form, 105, 107, 110–11, 114, 117–20, 122–4, 130 Capital, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15, 17–19, 24, 28, 30, 32–3, 38, 41–2, 44–5, 49–57,

62, 76, 78–92, 95–103, 105–6, 108, 110, 116, 121–4, 126–30, 142–3, 146, 153, 161–6, 185, 196, 215, 225, 240–1, 243, 246–52 Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, 3, 27, 163 Critique of the Gotha Programme, 17, 77, 216, 248 Doctoral Dissertation, 2, 25, 38, 131–7, 141–2 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 3, 11, 27, 44, 54, 126, 143, 145, 162–3, 165, 196, 205–6, 212, 215–16, 237, 248 Excerpts from James Mill, 163–5, 181–3, 195–6 Grundrisse, 4–5, 25, 27–8, 42–7, 49–51, 54, 78, 95, 99–100, 103, 126, 128, 132, 164–5, 185, 196–7, 233, 237, 247–8 Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, 167, 194 Notes on Wagner, 17, 93, 102–3, 186, 196 On the Jewish Question, 40, 163, 165 Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, 167–8, 212, 235 The Civil War in France, 216 The Class Struggles in France, 238 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 238 the mature Marx, 17, 70, 205 The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law, 239 The Poverty of Philosophy, 67, 77, 93, 102, 153, 164, 194, 196–7, 248 the young Marx, 58, 205 Theories of Surplus Value, 45, 80, 99, 129, 247–8 Theses on Feuerbach, 39 Wage Labour and Capital, 194 Marx, K. and F. Engels Manifesto of the Communist Party, 72, 209, 227, 232, 237–8

Index The German Ideology, 145, 147, 162, 183–4, 186, 196–7, 211, 239, 241 The Holy Family, 44, 54, 57, 76, 163, 181, 195, 248 Marxism analytical Marxism, 19, 32, 98, 103–4, 241, 250 Hegelian Marxism, 57, 60–1, 67 orthodox Marxism, 6, 8–10, 15, 21, 98 Western Marxism, 71, 98 materialism, 1, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 11–13, 15–23, 25–6, 33, 39, 61–3, 95, 100, 107, 142, 182, 198, 200 dialectical materialism, 8–9, 14–16, 31, 60, 98, 130, 143 historical materialism, 11, 19, 63 materialist appropriation school, 17 Mattick Jr, P., 96–7, 99, 249 McCarney, J., 23–4, 33, 56, 77, 91, 102–3, 249 McCarthy, G., 91, 102–3, 249 McLellan, D., 2, 27–8, 31, 52, 100, 132, 134, 136–7, 144, 237, 248–9 Meikle, S., 94, 96, 128 Merquior, J. G., 30–1, 249 methodological individualism, 52, 104 Mill, J. S., 208 Murray, P., 79, 126, 128–9 Nason, J., 93, 102, 249 nationalism, 228, 229 needs, 1, 18, 25, 63, 68, 73–4, 107, 122, 143, 146–55, 157–8, 160, 161–2, 166, 180–2, 189, 192, 207, 213, 220, 233 abstract needs, 153 contingent needs, 149 egoistic needs, 149–50, 159, 160, 166 luxury needs, 153–4, 161 natural needs, 147–53, 157–61, 166 necessary needs, 151–2, 154 particular needs, 148–9 Nietzsche, F., 213 Novack, G., 249

257

Oakley, A., 5, 28, 249 Ollman, B., 53, 88–9, 91, 101–2, 131, 143, 196, 226, 237, 249 philosophy of history, 60, 63, 180, 199, 201, 204, 206, 211, 219 Plato, 53, 103, 144, 203, 213 Plekhanov, G., 8–9, 12, 16, 29, 250 positivism, 8, 10, 15, 35, 94 positivist, 35, 94 postmodernism grand narratives, 41, 51, 205 postmodern, 52 praxis, 11–12, 14, 60, 64 proletariat, 10, 13, 67–72, 122–3, 199, 214, 227–9 Proudhon, P. J., 67, 93, 102 rational choice rational choice Marxism, 32, 98, 103–4, 241–2 rational choice theory, 19, 104 rationalism, 92 rationalist, 92, 93, 94, 209, 210 Rees, J., 32, 96, 103, 250 reflection theory, 7 relations of production, 25–6, 93, 120, 167–8, 170, 180–1, 183–6, 188, 190–3, 212, 214, 235 relations of recognition, 168, 170, 179, 180–1, 183, 192 relativism, 26, 230 Reuten, G., 18, 32–3, 88, 101–2, 126–8, 250 Ricardo, D., 24, 55, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 92, 93, 96, 99, 208, 250 Robbins, L., 92, 102, 250 Robinson, J., 81, 86, 88, 100–1, 250 Roll, E., 81, 99–100, 250 Rosten, Z., 134–5, 144 Rousseau, J. J., 31, 63, 175, 223, 242 Rubin, I. I., 83–4, 100, 250 Ruge, A., 2 Saint Pierre, l'abbé de, 223 Project for Perpetual Peace, 223 Sartre, J-P., 14, 31, 242, 251 Saunders, D., 207–8, 215, 251 Sayer, A., 88–9, 101, 251

258

Index

Sayer, D., 101 Sayers, S., 29 Schelling, F., 44, 58, 127 Schumpeter, J., 80, 99, 251 science, 1, 8, 14–17, 19, 24, 30, 36, 40, 51–2, 67–8, 73, 79, 81, 85–90, 92–4, 96–7, 111, 125, 130, 200–1, 210, 215 scientific realism, 89, 90, 94 Second International, 7–10, 16, 28, 31 Shamsavari, A., 32, 97, 99, 103, 251 Smith, A., 55, 81, 99, 103, 208 Smith, T., 19, 33, 55, 91, 99, 101–3, 106, 126, 129–30, 208 Sohn-Rethel, A., 109, 127–8, 251 Sowell, T., 88, 99–100, 251 Spinoza, B., 86, 92, 120–1, 127 Steindl, J., 91, 101–2, 251 Stepelevich, L. S., 27, 52, 76, 243, 251

Strauss, D., 38, 44 Life of Jesus, 44 structuralism, 15 Sweezy, P., 84–5, 90, 100, 102, 241, 245, 251 Taylor, C., 63–4, 72, 76–7, 103, 251 Wagner, A., 93 White, J., 77, 96–7, 103, 247, 252 Wilde, L., 28, 32, 102, 226, 237, 252 Williams, H., 26, 94–5, 103, 106, 126, 198, 238, 252 Wood, A., 88, 155, 252 Young Hegelians, 1–2, 27, 38–9, 52, 59, 70, 76, 132–3, 135, 142, 144, 240–1, 243, 249, 251 Young Hegelianism, 38–9 Zeleny, J., 85, 88–9, 100–1, 252

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