Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 8
The Law of Inheritance — An Overlooked Source
At one point Marx’s critique becomes especially sharp, and there it is worth looking at the surroundings in which it arose. Marx attacks Hegel’s treatment of the law of inheritance—primogeniture, entail, the bound landed property of the estate that ties political standing to inalienable wealth. He shows that Hegel here elevates a historical institution, one that secured the nobility of his time its constitutional standing, to the rank of a conceptual necessity.
The attack lands. At the same time it stands within a context that Marx does not mention.
Eduard Gans, under whom Marx had studied criminal law and Prussian civil law in Berlin, had published between 1824 and 1835 a four-volume work on the law of inheritance in its world-historical development. It is a Hegelian-method, comparative-historical study of exactly the subject Marx is treating here: it works through the inheritance orders of various cultures and epochs and asks what social constitution expresses itself in them. The work is little read today and deserves more attention than it receives.
What follows from this must be kept separate. What is documented is the constellation: Marx’s academic teacher had worked on the same subject with Hegelian means, and in such a way that the contingency of the respective order emerges through historical comparison. What is not documented is that Marx read the work; he does not name it, and in his published writings he scarcely ever names Gans at all.
For the question of this volume, it is the constellation that matters. It shows that the move Marx directs against Hegel—measuring a conceptually asserted necessity against historical diversity and thereby exposing it as a positing—had already been carried out within Hegelianism itself, by a man whose lectures Marx had attended. The attack does not come from outside. It is the application of a procedure Marx had learned in school to the teacher of that school.
This is no diminishment of Marx’s achievement. It is a determination of its nature. Whoever has truly taken up a method applies it wherever it takes hold—even where the result contradicts what its originator made of it. This, precisely, constitutes the use of a tool as distinct from the following of a doctrine.