Hegel and Marx: Reflections on the Narrative

Abstract

Hegel and Marx did not just happen. Nor are they like Gilbert and Sullivan, Beaumont and Fletcher, or even Marx and Engels. They never met and they never corresponded (Hegel died when Marx was 13). Marx referred many times in his voluminous works to Hegel, but then he also referred to an enormous number of writers — an almost unbelievable number. If there were a citation count, it is possible that Hegel would win, at least amongst philosophers, though this would hardly do more than start a discussion on why this is important and what it is supposed to mean. If Marx is to be linked up (or married off?) philosophically, there are alternative candidates — Aristotle is one.¹ But then it seems to me that Marx constantly draws on the early nineteenth-century remnants of medieval and early-modern ‘school philosophy’, deploying distinctions such as essence-appearance, motion-stasis, potential-actual, quantity- quality, and no doubt many others, without citing any particular author or source. I will be exploring these issues and others, in both philosophy and politics, as my aim is to stand back from the Hegel-Marx pairing as it has been transmitted to us, and to try to get it into a new perspective. I shall be arguing the following, hoping to clarify with complexity: