Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 7
What Hits Marx
The diction creates an appearance, and the appearance has consequences. It makes philosophy look like the cognition of an authority to which reality is subordinate; whoever reads this way finds in Hegel a world produced by a concept. That this reading misses the point changes nothing about the fact that Hegel’s own formulations support it — and Marx is right to hold this against him.
The second point cuts deeper. Hegel tends to take the complete conceptual comprehension of an object for its reconciliation. That the modern state can be understood in its necessity occasionally means, for him, that this state has realized reason. This conflates what belongs apart: the task an institution ought to fulfill, and the question of whether it fulfills it. Whoever lets the two collapse into one has turned a standard into a description and can no longer measure anything with that standard.
The third point is the most tangible. Hegel takes over provisions of the Prussian constitution of his time — the constitutional hereditary monarchy, the estate-based social structure, the role of the civil service — and, in the course of his exposition, gives them the appearance of conceptual necessity. Marx demonstrates this at the level of individual paragraphs, and he demonstrates it convincingly. What derives from empirical fact appears as if derived from the concept.
To this is added a methodological observation that reaches beyond the immediate occasion:
“What matters is that Hegel everywhere makes the Idea into the subject, and turns the actual, real subject, such as ‘political conviction,’ into the predicate. But the development always takes place on the side of the predicate.” (MEW 1, 209)
The real movement takes place among real conditions. This is correct, and it is a sentence Hegel would have to sign, if he set aside his diction.