Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 5
On the Relationship Between Hegel and Marx
What is stated briefly here is developed at length in Hegel und Marx — including the biographical connection through Eduard Gans, the critique of the Kreuznach manuscript, and the question of why Marx downplays his methodological origins. For what follows, the outline suffices.
The usual story — Marx as anti-Hegelian, turning the idealist Hegel “from his head onto his feet” — is understandable as Marx’s own historical self-presentation, but misleading as a methodological characterization.
What Marx actually does is thoroughly Hegelian in method: he begins with the simplest form in which the wealth of these societies appears — the wording of the first sentence already carries a critique, since it precisely does not say that wealth is a collection of commodities — and develops its inner contradiction into ever more concrete forms (money, capital). He analyzes a totality as a system of reciprocal mediations. He understands appearance as essential to essence, not as its mere shine. The three circuits of capital in the second volume of Capital can be presented as a system of syllogisms — though this observation claims less than it seems to promise: that an analysis can be cast into syllogistic figures says nothing about whether it is correct. Marx’s achievement lies in distinguishing the circuits in the first place and showing what their interlocking depends on; the figure represents the result, it does not produce it. And his analysis of the teleological inversion in M-C-M′ can be read as the historically determined shape of what is structurally already present in Hegel’s teleology: Hegel develops the independence of the means and the infinite progress of the external series of ends; that this becomes a societal autonomization of the means is a step beyond Hegel’s text, one that Marx carries out with respect to money. [KF]
Marx’s polemic against Hegel is therefore only partly directed against this method, which he himself practices; it primarily targets Hegel’s self-interpretation of that method, where it invites mystification: the Idea that releases itself, the “cunning of reason” that works behind the backs of individuals. These self-interpretations were real points at which Hegel’s diction allowed two readings. Read speculatively-apologetically, they sound like descriptions of a reconciliation already accomplished. Read in terms of the logic of the concept, they designate the task of a mediation, without thereby asserting its empirical-political fulfillment. Hegel himself did not consistently distinguish cleanly between the two readings, and Marx’s “inversion” destroys precisely the formulations that permitted this ambiguity — thereby freeing the substantive content that lies beneath the speculative diction. The rational kernel is the matter itself, but Hegel formulates it in several places in a way that blurs the difference between task and accomplishment.
From this follows a methodological rule that this essay follows throughout. Where Marx appears to criticize Hegel, one must first ask whether the criticism targets a real point in Hegel’s self-interpretation (then usually justified), the Hegelian method itself (then usually not), or a concretization that Hegel could not achieve in his own time (then an extension, not an objection). This distinction changes how we read the passage on the rabble, the analysis of property, the state — and it will accompany us throughout the course of this work.