What Is the Difference between Hegel and Marx?

Abstract

Here I have drawn some material from my recent “Hegel for Social Movements” to review the vexed question of the relation between Marx and Hegel. I base my observations on what Marx has written on various philosophical, methodological and political issues and not what he himself has said about his relation to Hegel, which are generally polemical and misleading. Nor shall I rely on what Engels has said in the course of popularising Marx’s ideas for 19th century socialists. The main difference between Hegel & Marx is the times they lived in The philosophical difference between Hegel and Marx is a topic which has been hotly disputed for over a century. The differences between the philosophical approaches of Hegel and Marx will be dealt with in detail later on, but the essential difference between Marx and Hegel is the times they lived in. Given the economic, social and cultural peculiarities of Germany in Hegel’s day there was some basis for Hegel to believe that it would be through philosophy that Germany could modernise itself. Today, this stands clearly exposed as an ‘idealist’ position ‒ to believe that an economic, social and cultural transformation could be achieved via a philosophical revolution, rather than the other way around. But this does not invalidate the choice Hegel made in his day. After Hegel’s death in 1831, his students did draw the revolutionary conclusions that were implicit in their teacher’s philosophy. Hegelianism spilt over the walls of the academy as his students popularised his teachings and translated them into the language of politics ‒ or more correctly, translated politics into the language of Hegelian philosophy. In 1841, the Prussian government moved to “expunge the dragon's seed of Hegelian pantheism” from the minds of Prussian youth. The newly-appointed Minister for Culture mobilized Friedrich Schelling (the last surviving representative of German Idealism, and now a conservative) to come to Berlin and do the job. His lecture in December 1841 was attended by Engels, Bakunin, Kierkegaard and notables from all over Europe but manifestly failed to quell the spread of radical ideas and revolutionary agitation which embraced Hegelian philosophy. It is a remarkable fact that almost all the revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th century were either students of Hegel, Hegelians of the second or third philosophical generation or influenced by other figures of German Philosophy of the time – Kant, Fichte and Schelling, but above all Hegel ‒ whether in the form of Marxism or other critical philosophical currents. So Hegel was not entirely mistaken in his belief in the political power of philosophy. By the time that Marx resigned the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1843, France had been rocked by a series of working class revolts and Paris was seething with revolutionary ferment, the English working class had constructed the first working class political party in history (the National Charter Association) and were challenging bourgeois rule in Britain, and an advanced industrial working class was emerging in Germany. It was now obvious that change would come to Europe through the political struggle of the industrial working class. Capitalist development was disrupting all the old relations and it was going to be the industrial working class who would lead the transformation. Furthermore, the leaders of the labour movement were not just demanding inclusion in or reform of the state, or even aiming to replace government with one of their own, but to smash the state. This was something unimaginable in Hegel’s day. * First published on the web in February 2020 and translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.