Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 11
Balance Sheet
Marx strikes home against Hegel at four points, and none of them is minor. The language that turns the Idea into an agent produces an illusion for which Hegel himself bears responsibility. The coincidence of conceptual completeness and actual reconciliation turns a standard into a description. The elevation of Prussian constitutional provisions to the rank of necessity is apologetics in the form of derivation. And the bureaucracy, which presents itself as the universal estate, has an interest of its own.
What is not hit is what Marx believes he is hitting. Demonstrating that Hegel makes the Idea into the subject does not dispose of what Hegel says about the family, civil society, and the state. The inversion is a procedure whose adequacy Marx never examines, even as he demands precisely this examination of Hegel. His own positive determinations — democracy as the solved riddle, the actual human being as the starting point — operate with categories he has not developed himself.
What becomes visible here is the figure that runs through this volume. Marx combats a mode of presentation and retains the procedure. He accuses Hegel of imposing a schema on the subject matter, and he imposes one of his own. He declares the Idea a smuggled-in subject and puts in its place determinations whose origin he does not disclose.
That this figure is not confined to the early writing becomes evident later, in a concept that Marx himself elevates into an acting subject. Chapter 5 of Part IV deals with this.