Marx (1).docx

From Marx to Hegel and Back: Capitalism, Critique, and Utopia, 2020

This book examines Hegel’s place in contemporary critical thinking, particularly in relation to Marx and Marxist theories. It makes the case for a double movement from Marx to Hegel and back, in order to provide a basis for contemporary social critique by uniting Marx’s social and economic critique with the ethical foundations of Hegel’s philosophy. The introductory chapter provides a tripartite overview of the most influential interpretations of the relation between Hegel and Marx in terms of ‘progressive’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘reverse’ readings: Progressive readings assume a significant development from Hegel to Marx where Marx ‘sublates’ Hegelian insights; disruptive readings start from the idea of a break between Hegel and Marx; and reverse readings argue for a return from Marx back to Hegel. It is suggested that parts of these readings can be subsumed under an interpretive spectrum called ‘helical’. This approach pursues an interpretive movement that follows a spiral course—‘from Marx to Hegel and back’. Elaborating on a helical approach, it is examined where parts of Hegel’s or Marx’s arguments can be revised by relying on arguments of the counterpart; at what points Hegel and Marx must be brought into a systematic confrontation; and in what ways the two thinkers can be read as complementing or reinforcing one another.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2003

Auslegung: a Journal of Philosophy, 1981

I review the vexed question of the relation between Marx and Hegel. I base my observations on what Marx has written on various philosophical, methodological and political issues and not what he himself has said about his relation to Hegel, which are generally polemical and misleading. Nor shall I rely on what Engels has said in the course of popularising Marx's ideas for 19th century socialists. I cover both political and philosophical differences and place these differences in a logical-historical reconstruction of their historical relation.

"A chapter from Rational Freedom vol 3 The Critique of Alien Politics by Dr Peter Critchley The argument shows how Marx showed how Hegel's attempt to achieve the reconciliation of the universal and the particular required the dissolution of the state and the dissolution of civil society. This would be done by converting the formal political principle, the constitution, into the material principle, the empirical lives and relationships of the demos in society. Marx was effectively seeking the realisation of rational Hegelian principles of the state through the achievement of true democracy. Even as the institutional form of self-estrangement, the state was also a positive expression of the human character, a demand for an ethicality and a rationality that did not exist in the real society. Marx thus retained the idea of the state as ethical agency whilst criticising the ability of the real state to be this agency."

Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, 2023

One of the enduring myths of the Soviet ideology of dialectical materialism is that Marx was a Hegelian, an objective idealist, when he wrote his doctoral dissertation "The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature." However, a study of both the formation of the Young Hegelian movement and Marx's dissertation shows that Marx was never a Hegelian. Rather, he was an independent-minded Young Hegelian who critically applied Hegel's dialectical method, disagreed with Hegel's appraisal of Epicurus, and openly promoted atheism. This study establishes, both historically and logically, why Marx was never a Hegelian and why he was able to break from the limitations of Young Hegelianism earlier than anyone.

Science & Society, 2021

Rereading the young Karl Marx's "Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right'" in light of a broader range of scholarship enables a more accurate understanding of the historical and intellectual significance of this work. Shlomo Avineri's pioneering treatment is deficient in important respects. A return to Marx's and Hegel's texts may help determine more exactly what Marx was trying to figure out through Hegel, and why he saw the need to move beyond Hegel to accomplish it. In Marx's mature writings, as Postone has shown, Marx's concept of "capital" purports to identify the real basis of Hegelian Geist. Recognizing this enables an analysis that provides a fuller view of both young and mature Marx as they relate to Hegel and to one another than is typical in the literature, which often either divides Marx into young-humanist and old-economist, or else inter-collapses old and young Marx too readily.

Alpheus, 2020

This paper initially intended to address discussions regarding the importance and scope of an alleged break between the early, philosophical articles of Marx and his later, mature historical-materialist socioeconomic investigations. But, because Marx in his early years dealt predominantly with Hegel the investigation of this 'break' morphed into a search for the proper locus of an idealism-naturalism transition within the field of the larger and more complex subject matter of the 'Hegel-Marx transition', which should also include Feuerbach and Engels. My provisional strategy to tackle the problematic is to 'complexify' the field by posing several probing questions and proposing a metaphor to see the Hegel-(Feuerbach)-Marx-(Engels) sequence as a more or less continuous bundle of ideas, some of which strands, intentionally or not, get silently dropped or explicitly refuted, and others silently or explicitly appropriated or transformed. I conclude that there are three major strands: A) ontology, B) methodology, and C) content, and that different commentators locate 'breaches' at different places in this uneven, bundled continuum of strands.

Les Études philosophiques, 2021

The paper explores the “critical disciple” relationship that Marx claims to have had with Hegel at the time he was writing Capital, by focusing on the problem of the status of concepts and theoretical discourse. Using freely, for hermeneutical purposes, the three critical models developed by Marx in the course of his critique of Hegelian speculation in his 1843 manuscript Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, the paper attempts to shed light on the content of Marx’s claimed “overturning” of Hegelian dialectic. Starting from the destitution of philosophy undertaken in the 1845-1846 drafts, we show that Marx identifies, at the very heart of the Hegelian philosophical discourse, an alienated relation to the concept, which we propose to name “concept fetishism”, based on a parallel with the analysis of commodity fetishism. We then analyse the strategies implemented by Marx in Capital to put to work the dialectical “method” elaborated by Hegel without falling back into this fetishism of the concept. From this point of view, Marx appears at the end of our analysis as a disciple of Hegel in that he takes up some of his conceptual and argumentative innovations ; but he appears as a critic of Hegel as far as the status of the theoretical discourse and the concepts by means of which the thinker tries to reconstruct and make sense of the concrete that he is trying to think are concerned.