Campbell, I.D.

English

This work evaluates the fruitfulness of the central theme
of Capital for the understanding of modern society. This
evaluation is carried out by discussing the relationship
of Marx's thought to Hegels, for not only is this
relationship of the foremost importance in the, as it
were, internal fashioning of Marx's thought, but it is
through this relationship that- the wider social
theoretical stature of that thought is developed. Hegel
posits the fundamental project of the critique of
existing alienated conditions which faces modern society
and social theory as its principal task. But he does so
in an ineradicably theological manner which prevents the
fully rational grasp of the requirements of fulfilling
this project. In Marx, the refashioning of this project
in a social scientifically corrigible fashion is
attempted, and the value of Marx's work is to be measured
in proportion to the success of this attempt.

More precisely, one of Hegel's programmatic statements of
the method of critique - the introduction to the
Phenomenology, f Spirit - is explicated at length, and
the influence of this method on Capital is discussed in
the rest of the work. The core theme of this discussion
is the vexed interpretative idea of Marx's having
"inverted" Hegel. Marx's materialist account of social
change is said to have been developed by inverting
Hegel's idealist scheme of history as the realisation of
self-conscious Spirit whilst retaining a common dialectic
form.

I conclude that Marx is broadly successful in rendering
the critique of alienation in a rationally corrigible
fashion. His critique of political economy and the
capitalist mode of production are of a form which is
essentially able to win intellectual conviction. This is
indeed an inversion of Hegel. It has been claimed that
such an inversion would carry implications of serious
weakness, for Hegel's dialectic is too thoroughly
idealist and theologically determinist to allow of its
being rationally appropriated. But in fact Hegel's
thought is far more sensitive to, and richly appreciative
of, the most pressing social issues, and is far more
encouraging to a materialist epistemological reworking,
for Marx's work to suffer from this inversion. However,
a problem of transposing the dialectic from idealism to
materialism remains to trouble Marx, and indeed trouble
him because of the directness of his inversion of Hegel.
For in respect of the crucial issue of determining the
proletarian establishment of socialism, Marx's
materialism so directly opposes idealism as to collapse
into naturalism. Marx's argument on this issue is
expressed in a very close analogy with what Marx takes to
be the laws of natural science; and is thus seriously
deficient in describing what Marx himself in the best
parts of his work insists is a movement of social
self-consciousness

Campbell, I. David

Edinburgh Research Archive

On inverting Hegel: the relations of Hegel's and Marx's accounts of alienation

https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/7146/1/353016.pdf

On inverting Hegel : The relations of Hegel's and Marx's accounts of alienation.

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