Michael Oakeshott on Marx on Hegel

In 1843, at the age of twenty-four or so, Karl Marx wrote down in a large notebook his thoughts about some passages of a work known to us as Hegel's Philosophy of Right. What he wrote was not printed until 1927, but at the time he intended to revise it for publication and in 1844 he wrote and pub+ lished an Introduction to it. These are the two pieces of writing here published in translation, together with a learned, if some- what naive, introduction by Mr Joseph O'Malley.* The Philosophy of Right is Hegel's chief adventure into moral philosophy, but the very small part of it which Marx commented upon is concerned with the institutions of government of a modern European state; and Marx admitted that his purpose in writing was to forward the 'fight against constitu- tional monarchy, as a self-contradictory and self-destroying hybrid.' That anyone with such a purpose should cast his thoughts into the form of a critique of Hegel's thoughts may seem odd; why not examine and expose the defects of the institutions themselves? But it must be understood that Marx be- longed to a generation of unfortunates who could not think about anything without en- gaging in the often tedious business of ex- plaining exactly how their thoughts related to what they took Hegel to have said.

This had been going on ever since Hegel's death in 1831; Marx came to it late. It was first engaged in by some self-conscious young men who had sat at the Master's feet. in Berlin, who had felt the force of his char- isma and were genuine students of his writ- ings. But, whereas Hegel was a masterful original thinker, these were epigoni intent upon eliciting from his writings a creed 'which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.' Part of this creed was be *Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right Karl Marx, edited with an introduction and notes by Joseph O'Malley (our 55s) lieved actually to be found in the writings of the Master, but for them the more interesting part was an elaboration of what they took to be the 'consequences' of the Hegelian philosophy.

There were many such consequences, but first in importance was an allegedly new view of religious belief. As part of an elaborate argument Hegel had said that all deities re- side in the human breast; they were 'thoughts' and in some respects the most important thoughts ever to be entertained by human beings. From this, these disciples advanced to conclude that religious beliefs were

thoughts of a peculiarly corrupting kind, namely, illusory wish-fulfilments indulged in

as consolations for the unhappinesses and frustrations of human life; they represented, not the great intellectual and moral achieve- ments Hegel had supposed, but merely a sor- did 'self-alienation' of human beings.

Again, Hegel had said that world history was the self-realisation of 'Spirit' or God,

achieved in a process of 'criticism' or 'dia-

lectic'; these disciples reduced the process to a formula and concluded that what was be- ing 'realised' was the human race: humanity was God. And so on. Such notions, or their like, had long been familiar to esprits forts, but for these they were lessons they believed

themselves to have learned from the Master. Thus, in the course of a few years, the 'phil- osophy of Hegel' became a palimpsest in

which the original was scarcely to be dis- cerned underneath the 'interpretations' of such writers as Feuerbach, Bruno, Bauer, Max Stirner, etc, each proclaiming a saving dogmatic 'truth' (about religion, art, history

or human activity) purporting to be a 'conse-

quence' of Hegel. The mission undertaken by these writers was to release mankind from intellectual error by the 'terrorism of pure theory' and to proclaim agnostic apocalypse of scientific knowledge.

This enterprise was well advanced when Marx (some ten years junior to its initiators) joined the circle. The urge to cast his thoughts into the form of a critique of Hegel was irresistible; but the only Hegel he knew was one already reduced to formulas; not a Hegel to inspire thought, but one adapted for use. And this suited him very well be- cause he and his companions (Moses, Hess, Engels, Lorenz van Stein, etc) had other concerns. These philosophers, as he said later, had interpreted the world (Hegel'?) differently; the point now was to change it. They had 'unmasked' the self-alienation of religion; he was concerned to use their form- ulas to 'unmask self-alienation in its secular forms.' The 'critique of heaven' was to be transformed into a 'critique of earth.' What they had done with Christianity, he was to do with capitalism. Where as Stirner had an- nounced that every work of art (and, indeed, every recognition of 'truth') was a self-alien- ation, Marx was concerned with the condi- tions in which homo lahorans was self-alien- ated in his artefacts. The apocalypse des- cried was not merely a release from error but an emancipation from slavery.

All this is briskly set out in the Introduc- tion to the so-called Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Much of it is taken from Bruno Bauer and from Feuerbach, but to everything he took Marx always added a touch of vulgarity and exaggeration : no writer is so adept at turning a possible truth into a superstition. He half-apologises for 'dealing with a copy' (ie, Hegel's philosophy) instead of 'directly with the original'—the political institutions of Germany. But, he says, this is unavoidable. The conditions in Germany have already been 'refuted by history'; they are 'beneath the level of history' and thus 'beneath criticism.' The rest of Europe (particularly France) has passed on leaving Germany a 'comic ghost', the last outdated relic of the ancien regime. All that is left standing to criticise and to refute is 'the German philosophy of the state', a rick- ety affair purporting to 'justify' the 'condi- tions in Germany.'

The Critique itself is an odd performance; so far as Hegel is concerned totally worth- less. Briefly, Hegel had understood a human community to be persons whose terms of association reflected their characters as rational free agents. The idea 'state' was that of a community whose order answered perfectly to their characters. The early part of the Philosophy of Right is concerned to establish human beings as rational free agents (as `wills'); and, among much else, to show that they can be neither persons gov- erned solely by their individual consciences, nor persons joined merely in respect of satis- fying one another's wants, but must be per- sons 'organically' joined in the recognition of the authority of a vernacular language of moral intercourse. And he ended his work by saying something about the institutions of government appropriate to such a commun- ity (namely, in his opinion, constitutional government, equality before the law, public trial by jury, popular participation in legis- lation, a disinterested bureaucracY, freedom of the press, etc) and by considering in what respects some of the current institutions of Prussia answered to what in principle was required. Marx says nothing directly, about the starting-plan of Hegel's argument, and he mistakes its general tenor. Instead of under- standing- Hegel to be asking the question, What is the character of a society of rational free agents—persons in respect of being `wills'?, that is, What is the idea State?, Marx understands him to be offering a demonstra- tion of how the Absolute Idea (regarded as a kind of cosmic demiurge) creates the empir-

ical actualities..of political sentiments and relationships. He turns Hegel's 'speculative philosophy' into the vulgarest kind of Plato- nism to be disposed of by the Feuerbachian formula. And he mistakes Hegel's not always felicitous attempt to find the quantum of rationality in some of the well-known insti- tutions of European law and government for an attempt to deduce some of the more anti- quated of these institutions from the Abso- lute Idea and thus to justify them. In short, Marx fathers upon Hegel almost everything Hegel himself expressly disclaimed.

Thus, Marx's Critique is an eloquent wit- ness to the havoc wrought by Hegel's self- appointed followers when they transformed his philosophy into a creed and then, loth to believe him beyond redemption, undertook to convert him (dead) to its formularies or to expose him as an apostate. One wonders why they should bother with the old man; but, somehow, it seems to have been as im- portant to them that he should believe or be convicted of unbelief as that they should be correct in their own conclusions. Nor, so far as Marx himself is concerned, is it a very significant piece of writing. Ideas are adum- brated which were later to be developed or discarded, but it is impossible to find in it more than the very vague and fanciful be- ginnings of what he had sought for in vain in Hegel: an account of the order of a society 'adequate to the social nature of man.'

The Critique and its Introduction are, then, birds of inconsiderable feather, but perhaps not totally commonplace: which of us at the age of twenty-four could have collected together a heap of rubbish of such dimensions and variety and displayed it with such confidence?,