Andreas Arndt, Hegel in Marx: Studien zur dialektischen Kritik und zur Theorie der Befreiung Dietz, Berlin 2023. 270pp., 25,00€ pb. ISBN 978-3-320-02407-9 Reviewed by Adrian Wilding ( Published in the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books (March 2024) https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21427_hegel-in-marx-studien-zur-dialektischen-kritik-und-zur-theorie-der-befreiung-by-andreas-arndt-reviewed-by-adrian-wilding/ ) How much Hegel is there in Marx? How far did Hegel influence Marx in what he thought and wrote? Was this influence a lasting one or did it pass with time? Are we right to view Marx as Hegel’s great critic? Over the years, answers to these questions have abounded. The most influential view, however, was that Hegel was a preoccupation of Marx’s juvenilia and that the mature Marx put away childish things. But what if this view is wrong and Marx remained a Hegelian his whole life? What if Marx’s self-image as the great opponent of Hegelian ‘idealism’ has only muddied the waters? ‘If we take Marx at his word,’ Arndt opens this fascinating book, ‘Hegel was an idealist, he, Marx, was a materialist, he placed Hegel's dialectic on a different, materialist basis and thus preserved its rational core. But this assertion raises more questions than it answers. What exactly is this “rational core”? How can it even be separated from the Hegelian foundation? What does “materialism” mean in Marx, and which claims to differ from the “old”, contemplative materialism? And how is the materialism/idealism dichotomy supposed to apply to Hegel if Hegel already declares it obsolete with regard to his philosophy?’ (9). This collection of Arndt’s recent essays is above all a settling of accounts, a righting of wrongs, namely a widespread but ultimately mistaken set of assumptions about how Marx and Hegel relate to one another. The most persistent myth or legend is that Marx ‘turned Hegel, who is standing on his head, the right way up’ and ‘extracted a rational (i.e. materialist) kernel from the mystical shell’ of his philosophy. Both of these common beliefs, Arndt argues, are erroneous: they miss the subtleties and complexities of the Hegel-Marx relationship. As Arndt jokes in a recent interview about the book, ‘Hegel already walks very well on his feet.’ Above all, two misconceptions are redressed. Firstly, when Hegel talks about ‘the concept’ or ‘the idea’ he is referring not to something free-floating, let alone some sort of demiurge, as Marx portrayed it, but – as the Science of Logic shows – to a fundamental categorial structure without which we cannot think or act in the world. Marx accuses Hegel of spinning the world out of ideas like some spiritual spider, but he thereby fails to see that this structure is just as objective as subjective, just as real as ideal. Marx compounds the error by equating the work of abstraction consciously undertaken in the Logic with Hegel’s writings as such (10). Secondly, Hegel’s Realphilosophie and philosophies of ‘Objective Spirit’, which deal, so to say, with the ‘non-ideal’, treat in critical ways many of the same phenomena, for instance labour (understood as mediating our interchange with nature) which preoccupied Marx, though his blinkered view of these as ‘idealist’ works blinds him to the common ground. If Hegel’s dialectic is already a ‘realist’ and ‘concrete’ one then, conversely, the category of ‘matter’ in Marx’s materialism is, Arndt argues, an abstraction lacking in determinations (Bestimmungen) and which thus falls prey – like the Being (Sein) with which the Logic begins – to its own negation. A materialism which regards finite things as an ultimate is little more than ‘a bad idealism’ (66). Which is to say that Hegel’s thought is far less ‘idealist’ than is normally assumed, while Marx’s materialism may be as abstract and metaphysically loaded as any traditional idealism. A ‘worldview’ – and even Marx’s ‘sensuous-active’ version of materialism is finally a worldview – does not a ‘science’ make (77). Marx’s putative materialism is no philosophical counter-position to Hegel, and readers need to look beyond the rhetoric to focus instead on what unites the two thinkers: both are, at heart, monists, i.e. each understands the real and the ideal, matter and thinking as integral aspects of a totality – the ‘world’ (ibid.). On numerous topics, Arndt shows, Marx and Hegel come closer than we normally think. One of these topics is economics. Familiar is Hegel’s critique of capitalism’s irrational ‘system of needs’: human lives sacrificed to a law of demand and supply which ‘ebbs and flows blindly, like the elements’ (Hegel 1979: 249). Likewise the chasm Hegel saw opening up in bürgerliche Gesellschaft between rich and the poor, making social unrest endemic (192). Such overlaps with Marx are not surprising: both were close, critical readers of Adam Smith, political economy and the English press’s news of industrial Britain and it led them to similar conclusions. Less well-known, as Arndt brings to light, is that most of Hegel’s economic writings were destroyed posthumously by his son, so that they ‘could not be put to ill use’ (just as many of his writings on religion were destroyed by his – very pious – wife). What might these writings have contained? Might the rapprochement between the two thinkers have been closer still? Marx, Arndt underlines, was not alone in misunderstanding Hegel, nor in misrepresenting his debt to him. One chapter gives a fresh account of the relationship between Marx and the Young Hegelians, who were prone to many of the same (admittedly highly fruitful) misreadings. Other chapters jump forward in time to discuss Lenin’s reading of Hegel, Pashukanis’ writings, and Adorno’s Hegel-critique in his lectures of 1963/4: ‘Adorno’s core objection, which motivates and justifies the project of a negative dialectic, that we must give voice to the thing itself as nonidentical, fails to hit the mark because Hegel takes precisely this non-identity of concept and reality as constitutive for the Realphilosophie’ (252). Equally thought-provoking chapters explore the concept of value in Marx’s Capital, the theme of individuality in Hegel and Marx, and what Marx meant by ‘the realm of freedom’. Freedom, of course, is at the heart of any Hegel-Marx comparison. For Arndt, Marx shares not only Hegel’s understanding of freedom as something ‘concrete’, ‘social’ and ‘bound up with our relationship to nature’ (166) but also his view of history as, if not a story of freedom emergent, at least a story of progress in our awareness of freedom’s importance. What differences there are between the two thinkers come down to this: Marx was able to add detail to the catalogue of human unfreedoms under capitalism which Hegel could only have glimpsed. In all this, Hegelian freedom remained the measure of Marx’s own critique (12). This sketch of the book having been drawn, a word of assessment is in order. In a recent interview about the book, Arndt is asked what role law (Recht) takes in the relationship between the two thinkers. Didn’t Marx critique law and the state as forms of domination; isn’t the state – including Hegel’s ‘rational’ version – to be dismantled in a post-capitalist society? It is interesting that Arndt demurs on this point, seeing something ineluctable in the persistence of laws, even of property rights, albeit in some new shape (Arndt 2024). Here I sympathise with the question and am sceptical of Arndt’s answer: he seems to read too much of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie into Marx. For Arndt the left was mistaken to believe the end of capitalism could herald the birth of a ‘new man’. Fair enough, but the Bilderverbot Marx placed around communism forbids not just utopian visions but also their opposite: Arndt’s somewhat cynical appeal to ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. Marx, one wants to reply, was not Kant. A similarly jarring statement occurs in the book: the suggestion that the critique of alienation in Marx’s Capital Volume 1 is a hangover from his romantic youth (200). In fact, that critique describes in very plausible, concrete terms the human capabilities denied by capital, and it makes sense that Marx hung on to it throughout his life. Marx, to his credit, seems to have recognised the ‘tinkering bureaucrat’ (to use Richard Gunn’s phrase) at work in Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie. Hegel’s late work of political philosophy arguably forgets many of his earlier, more radical insights, not least (as Arndt concedes) that a right to property may endanger rather than guarantee freedom. Hegel’s ground-breaking critique of the natural law tradition seemed to become blunted with age. It is true that the Philosophy of Right’s criticisms of bürgerliche Gesellschaft are sometimes trenchant, but they remind one – to take an example from the years following Hegel’s death – of Carlyle’s Chartism, with its picture of industrial society as a powder keg; Engels’ fitting response (in The Condition of the Working Class in England) was not to hope the state could defuse this powder keg but…to strike a match. On occasion, Arndt is guilty, like many Hegel scholars, of harmonising the differences between Hegel’s works. If we are to question myths about Hegel then we must also question what may be Hegel’s own myths, not least his self-image as builder of a seamless ‘system’. Arguably it is tensions between Hegel’s different works that make more sense of them, their history and the conflicting interpretations (not least, the irreconcilable Hegelian schools) to which they gave rise. In this context, Lukács (1975: 456) was surely on to something when he spoke of a ‘dawn’ and a ‘dusk’ in Hegel’s thought, pointing, in particular, to the difference between the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the Philosophy of Right (1820). Arndt is correct that a ‘story of freedom’ runs throughout Hegel’s thought, but the unconstrained vision of collective historical agency in the early work contrasts strikingly with freedom’s hidebound, institutionalised form in the late. If the Phenomenology, as one of Hegel’s students put it, is ‘the textbook of humankind’s liberation’ (Windischmann cited in Vieweg 2023: 182), suffused with the spirit of the French Revolution, by the time of the Philosophy of Right the blazing torch of 1789 seemed to have dimmed. That Hegel continued to raise a glass of champagne each Bastille Day hardly disproves this. In Hegel’s early work the idea of freedom (not least in the so-called ‘master-slave dialectic’) fulminates and flashes like flowing lava; in his later work, freedom has the cold symmetry of basalt. Readers of this website – which has done much to nuance the Marx-Hegel divide – will rightly welcome Arndt’s illuminating thesis. To those who have come to Marx through Marxism-Leninism, it may seem counterintuitive. The ‘science’ of the latter, after all, was premised on diminishing (or even discrediting) Marx’s forbear. But intuitions are made to be questioned, and once one does think through Marx and Hegel in an open way – here Arndt is exactly right – it not only generates new perspectives on both thinkers but sheds new light on the great political challenges of our time. References Andreas Arndt (2024) interview, 99 zu Eins podcast, online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veJDvKgdfUI (accessed 24.2.24). G. W. F. Hegel (1979) System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. H. S. Harris & T. M. Knox, Albany: SUNY Press. Georg Lukács (1975) The Young Hegel, trans. R. Livingstone, London: Merlin. Klaus Vieweg (2023) Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom, trans. S. Kottman, Stanford: Stanford University Press.