The "Spiral Staircase" Problem: The Return of Practice at a Higher Level
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Anyone who comes to Hegel today usually comes from a particular tradition. Many readers have read Marx first; some have read Gramsci or Lukács; others know Critical Theory or contemporary philosophy of praxis. They come to Hegel not as a neutral philosophical text, but with a specific question in mind: How does theory relate to practice? How are interpretation and the transformation of the world mediated?
These readers encounter a surprising experience. They expect to find in Hegel the “idealist counterpart” — pure theory moving self-sufficiently within concepts. Instead, they discover that it is precisely Hegel’s logic that explicates the structures of practice: self-movement, productive negativity, the transformative power of contradiction. The critique of Hegel turns out to be a productive self-misreading, one that made it possible to open up new fields of application.
This chapter follows a “spiral staircase” structure. We begin with the Left Hegelians, who set the philosophy of action against Hegel’s supposed contemplativism (Chapter 2). We recall Marx’s distancing from Hegel, which we have already encountered — but now we are not interested in the theoretical critique itself, but in its history of influence. What traditions emerged from the demand not merely to interpret the world but to change it? And how does this tradition relate to Hegelian logic?
The answer, in advance: the practice challenge is not solved, but it is integrable. A contemporary interpretation of Hegel must show that logic itself is already practice — not theory subsequently applied, but an original unity of thinking and acting. This is exactly what the most productive representatives of the Marxist tradition recognized, even if they could not always carry it out systematically.