Marxism And Hegel

The interpretation of Hegel has been a focal point of philosophical controversy ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, both among Marxists and in the major European philosophical schools. Yet despite wide differences of emphasis most interpretations of Hegel share important similarities. They link his idea of Reason to the revolutionary and rationalist tradition which led to the French Revolution, and they interpret his dialectic as implying a latently atheist and even materialist world outlook. Lucio Colletti directly challenges this picture of Hegel. He argues that Hegel was an essentially Christian philosopher, and that his dialectic was explicitly anti-materialist in both intention and effect. In contrast to earlier views, Colletti maintains that there is no contradiction between Hegel’s method and his system, once it is accepted that his thought is an exercise in Absolute Idealism stemming from a long Christian humanist tradition. He claims, on the contrary, that intellectual inconsistency is rather to be found in the works of Engels, Lenin, Lukás, Kojève and others, who have attempted to adapt Hegel to their own philosophical priorities. Colletti places his argument in the context of a broad re-examination of the whole relationship between Marxism and the Enlightenment, giving novel emphasis to the relationship between Marxism and Kant. He concludes by re-asserting the importance in Marxism of empirical science against the claim of “infinite reason,” while at the same time showing how Marx did transform key ideas in Hegelian thought to construct a consistently materialist dialectic.

Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social is a detailed investigation of the major works of Hegel and the young Marx exploring how the concept of the individual is positioned within their ontologies and how this positioning is reflected in their related political views.

One reader has called this study, first published in 1984, ‘easily the best book on the relation of Hegel to Marx’. With spirited argument, MacGregor demonstrates that Hegelian logic suited Marx’s purpose so well because it already contained the unique elements that later appeared in Marx’s social theory, including the notions of surplus value and the transition to communism. The most exciting thing about the book is the clear demonstration that the mature Marx gets ever closer to Hegel, and is increasingly indebted to him. In short, the author gives us a new Hegel and a new Marx. In a manner both original and penetrating, MacGregor shows that dialectical logic is pre-eminently social logic, a reconstruction in thought of social relationships and social structure. Central to the work is the examination of the Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel delineated a theory of modern capitalist society. MacGregor provides a compelling analysis of Hegel’s importance for Lenin and a strong caveat that contemporary Marxism ignores Hegel to its own peril. MacGregor establishes that Hegel’s absolute idealism is founded on a theory of the dialectics of labour similar to Marx’s historical materialism. Another significant discovery elucidates Hegel’s concept of poverty as the missing link which joins Marx’s formulation to classical liberal theory.

This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth reappraisal of the relation between Marx’s economic theory in Capital and Hegel’s Logic by leading Marxian economists and philosophers from around the world. The subjects dealt with include: systematic dialectics, the New Dialectics, materialism vs. idealism, Marx’s ‘inversion’ of Hegel, Hegel’s Concept logic (universality-particularity-singularity), Hegel’s Essence logic (essence-appearance), Marx’s levels of abstraction of capital in general and competition, and capital as Hegelian Subject. The papers in this volume were originally presented at the 22nd annual meeting of the International Symposium on Marxian Theory at Mount Holyoke College in August 2011. The twelve authors are divided between seven economists and five philosophers, as is fitting for the interdisciplinary subject of the relation between Marx’s economic theory and Hegel’s logic. Contributors are: Chris Arthur, Riccardo Bellofiore, Roberto Fineschi, Gastón Caligaris, Igor Hanzel, Juan Iñigo Carrera, Mark Meaney, Fred Moseley, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten, Mario Robles, Tony Smith, and Guido Starosta.

The great French Marxist philosopher weighs up the contributions of the three major critics of modernity With the translation of Lefebvre's philosophical writings, his stature in the English-speaking world continues to grow. Though certainly within the Marxist tradition, he consistently saw Marx as an 'unavoidable, necessary, but insufficient starting point'. Unsurprisingly, Lefebvre always insisted on the importance of Hegel to understanding Marx. But the imposing Metaphilosophy also suggested the significance he ascribed to Nietzsche, in the 'realm of shadows' through which philosophy seeks to think the world. Lefebvre proposes here that the modern world is at the same time Hegelian in terms of the state; Marxist in terms of the social and society; and Nietzschean in terms of civilization and its values. As early as 1939, Lefebvre pioneered a French reading of Nietzsche that rejected the philosopher's appropriation by fascism, bringing out the tragic implications of Nietzsche's proclamation that 'God is dead' long before this approach was followed by such later writers as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Forty years later, in the last of his philosophical writings, Lefebvre juxtaposes the contributions of the three great thinkers, in a text whose themes remain surprisingly relevant today.

This book provides close readings of primary texts to analyze the linkage between G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy and Karl Marx’s critical social theory of necessity and freedom. This is important for three reasons: first, to understand the significance of the changing relationships of work, society, and critical social theory in the origins of Hegelian-Marxism in the US, as documented in the recently published correspondence between the Marxist-Humanist theoretician Raya Dunayevskaya and the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse; second, to identify the intersections of the Critical Theorists Jurgen Habermas’ and Marcuse’s influential reinterpretations of Marx’s “value theory” of economy and society that enables navigation of the changing relationships of the social and economic spheres in the last century, as developed in Marx’s Grundrisse; and, thirdly, to assess the potential of Moishe Postone’s renewal of Marx’s value theory, largely conceived by the notion of a necessity and freedom dialectic intrinsic to capitalism.

One reader has called this study, first published in 1984, ‘easily the best book on the relation of Hegel to Marx’. With spirited argument, MacGregor demonstrates that Hegelian logic suited Marx’s purpose so well because it already contained the unique elements that later appeared in Marx’s social theory, including the notions of surplus value and the transition to communism. The most exciting thing about the book is the clear demonstration that the mature Marx gets ever closer to Hegel, and is increasingly indebted to him. In short, the author gives us a new Hegel and a new Marx. In a manner both original and penetrating, MacGregor shows that dialectical logic is pre-eminently social logic, a reconstruction in thought of social relationships and social structure. Central to the work is the examination of the Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel delineated a theory of modern capitalist society. MacGregor provides a compelling analysis of Hegel’s importance for Lenin and a strong caveat that contemporary Marxism ignores Hegel to its own peril. MacGregor establishes that Hegel’s absolute idealism is founded on a theory of the dialectics of labour similar to Marx’s historical materialism. Another significant discovery elucidates Hegel’s concept of poverty as the missing link which joins Marx’s formulation to classical liberal theory.

The relation between Hegel and Marx is among the most interpreted in the history of philosophy. Given the contemporary renaissance of Marx and Marxist theories, how should we re-read the Hegel-Marx connection today? What place does Hegel have in contemporary critical thinking? Most schools of Marxism regard Marx's inversion of Hegel's dialectics as a progressive development, leaving behind Hegel's idealism by transforming it into a materialist critique of political economy. Other Marxist approaches argue that the mature Marx completely broke with Hegel. By contrast, this book offers a wide-ranging and innovative understanding of Hegel as an empirically informed theorist of the social, political, and economic world. It proposes a movement 'from Marx to Hegel and back', by exploring the intersections where the two thinkers can be read as mutually complementing or even reinforcing one another. With a particular focus on essential concepts like recognition, love, revolution, freedom, and the idea of critique, this new intervention into Hegelian and Marxian philosophy unifies the ethical content of Hegel's philosophy with the power of Marx's social and economic critique of the contemporary world.