From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx

by Sidney Hook

In this brilliant work, first published in 1936, Sydney Hook seeks to resolve one of the classic problems of European intellectual how the political radicalism and philosophical materialism of Karl Marx issued from the mystical and conservative intellectual system of G.W.F. Hegel. This edition contains a forward by Christopher Phelps discussing Hook's career and the significance of From Hegel to Marx in the history of ideas.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, History

335 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Sidney Hook was an American pragmatic philosopher known for his contributions to public debates. A student of John Dewey, Hook continued to examine the philosophy of history, of education, politics, and of ethics. He was known for his criticisms of totalitarianism (fascism and Marxism–Leninism). A pragmatic social democrat, Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing communism. After WWII, he argued that members of conspiracies, like the Communist Party USA and other Leninist conspiracies, ethically could be barred from holding offices of public trust.

Reviews

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Clash of Ideas and Symbols

I love the clash of ideas. The clashes of the past are often even more stimulating, because you can see what eventuated.

This is a collection of thematically linked studies on the intellectual growth of the Young Karl Marx. It starts with Hegel and ends with Ludwig Feuerbach. In between, it deals with various Hegel-influenced sparring partners, such as David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Max Stirner and Moses Hess.

Marx was born in 1818. Hegel died in 1831, when Marx was just 13. By 1848, the 30 year old Marx and Engels had written "The Communist Manifesto" and released it in February, at the very beginning of the 1848 Revolutions in Europe.

In between, there was a struggle for the legacy of Hegel, as well as a reconsideration of his philosophy by both supporters and antagonists alike.

Auseinandersetzungen

This was a highly political time in which feudal states were challenged by revolutionary and populist movements, some of them overtly socialist or communist.

Many interpreted Hegel's philosophy as a quietism that supported the German state. It wasn't sufficiently radical for the Young, Left Hegelians, some of whom had begun to advocate political and social revolution.

Political philosophy occurred not just in academia and books, but in newspapers and periodicals. The participants argued with each other, both in person and in print. In the middle of it all was the Young Marx.

Sidney Hook documents these debates, occasionally using the German word, "Auseinandersetzung", to describe each controversy. It's a wonder they didn't become physical altercations. On the page, there were no holds barred, whether or not the participants were friends.

The Riazanov Legacy

Hook first published his book in 1936, another time of political and philosophical contention.

He studied philosophy under the Pragmatist, John Dewey, at Columbia. In 1928, he visited Moscow to inspect the work of the Marx-Engels Institute under the auspices of David Riazanov.

Riazanov was collecting and editing the works of both Marx and Engels, many of which hadn't been translated into English at the time. As his project progressed, he increasingly came into conflict with Stalin. In 1931, Riazanov was expelled from the Communist Party and dismissed from the Institute. In his introduction, Hook describes this as "a heavy blow to Marxian scholarship". Riazanov was ultimately sentenced to death and executed in January, 1938.

A Philosophy Betrayed

Hook was a Marxist at the time. However, just as there had been a dispute over the legacy of Hegel, there was a dispute over the legacy of Marx ninety years later. By this time, Stalin (never a great thinker or sophisticate) had started to cement his version of Marxism-Leninism as the foundation of the Soviet State. Any other interpretations were seen as a threat to ideological and political orthodoxy (especially in the shadow of the Second World War and the threat of Nazism), and were extinguished (usually by the extinguishment of the mind that had expounded them - ironically, Germany's philosophical revolutionaries seemed to escape with their lives and mere jail sentences in the 1840's.)

The events in the thirties saw Hook eschew Soviet Communism and ultimately Marxism, until eventually he became an anti-Communist (he called himself a Democratic Socialist to the end of his life, even though few believed him!).

It seems that Hook moved away from Communism, because of the betrayal of Marx' philosophy by totalitarian Communist states, rather than any substantive disagreement with Marx' philosophy itself.

Naturalistic Humanism

Hook refers to Marx' philosophy as "historical, naturalistic humanism".

He suggests that much of Marx' approach resembles the Pragmatism of John Dewey: "[I regard] the philosophy of experimental naturalism...as a continuation of what is soundest and most fruitful in Marx' philosophical outlook upon the world".

Hook was trying to rescue the essence of Marx from his abuse by Stalinists and other Vulgar Marxists: "Marx was a democratic socialist, a secular humanist, and a fighter for human freedom. His words and actions breathe a commitment to a way of life and a critical independence completely at odds with the absolute rule of the one party dictatorship of the Soviet Union".

Gained in Translation

Much of this book is based on Hook's own readings and translations of "The German Ideology" and "The Holy Family", as well as "The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts", none of which would be published until much later.

This was probably the first time that many English-speaking philosophers would have become familiar with Marx' writing before "The Communist Manifesto". The same can probably be said for the works of the other philosophers (apart from Hegel).

Hook writes with precision, insight and a dash of humour that occasionally reminded me of Bertrand Russell at his most mischievous. There are good summaries of the core philosophies of the Young Hegelians, at least as far as they intersect with both Hegel and Marx. The studies don't just throw light on Marx' development. They're particularly valuable as attempts to understand the contemporary response to Hegel.

The Autobiography of God

A major difference between Hegel and Marx relates to the role of religion.

Hegel said his Logic was "the exposition of God as He is in His eternal essence before the creation of the world and man."

Hegel defines both self-consciousness and history in terms of God as well:

"For Hegel, history is the march of the spirit toward freedom. Freedom can be found only in self-consciousness. Absolute self-consciousness is God. History is the autobiography of God."

The History of an Abstraction

Marx responds that, in Hegel's system, "The history of man is transformed into the history of an abstraction...

"[However,] History does nothing; it 'possesses no colossal riches'; it 'fights no fight'. It is, rather, man - real, living man - who acts, possesses and fights in everything. It is by no means 'History' which uses man as a means to carry out its ends as if it were a person apart; rather History is nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends."

Hook adds:

"Marx...seeks a causal explanation of historical activity not in the way people think, not in their abstract ideas, but in their concrete needs and in the conditions out of which those needs arose."

Beautifully Coloured Soap Bubbles

Contrast Hegel's Idealism:

"Marx regarded the entire Hegelian philosophy as a transliteration into obscure prose of the underlying ideas of Western Christianity and therefore shot through, despite itself and the dialectical method, with dualism. God and Self are regarded as implicitly one. The end of man is logically predetermined...

"Man's historical development is really a spiritual pilgrimage in quest for fulfilment - union with God or the Absolute...

"Marx' scientific naturalism or materialism banishes these beautifully coloured soap bubbles to the realm of poetic fantasy and literary psychology..."

Turning the World Right Side Up

Marx criticises Hegel's "Phenomenology":

"Instead of treating self-consciousness as the self-consciousness of real men, living in a real, objective world and conditioned by it, Hegel transforms man into an attribute of self-consciousness. He turns the world upside down."

Further, "in opposition to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, we rise from earth to heaven."

The two differ on the very role of philosophy:

"The purpose of [Marx'] own social theories was to provide that knowledge of social tendencies which would most effectively liberate revolutionary action. Philosophy is not retrospective insight into the past; it is prospective anticipation of the future. It explains why the present is what it is, in order to to make it different. So often an expression of social quietism, or a means of individual escape, philosophy must now function as an instrument of social liberation. The social world is not inherently reasonable as Hegel claimed. It must be made reasonable. In the words of his well-known gloss on Feuerbach, 'Until now philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is to change it.'"

Marx purports to turn Hegel right side up. He puts man back on his feet, so that he can change his world by means of social action, including by way of revolution.

Out of the Mystic and Divine

This social critique applies equally to morality:

"Morality...for Marx is natural. He therefore rules out any ethics based on divine revelation. Morality...is social. And all mystic and purely personal intuitions about the nature of 'the good' and 'the better' must go by the board. Morality is active...Morality is based upon needs, upon what man as a social creature desires...For Marx all ethical systems which presuppose a scale of objective values - of values that are above the battle of class and party - are direct or indirect disguises which mask the hidden interests of one of the contestants."

Hegel's and Marx' views with respect to the ends of philosophy differ in the same way:

"In Hegel...there is only one process, one systematic whole in which everything moves and has its being...Everything is both means and end to everything else. The universe is through and through purposive."

In Marx:

"Social movement [involves] volition. Volition depends on two sets of relations: relations between nature and man; and relations between man and man. In either case the point of departure [from Hegel] is human need. It is human need expressed as purpose which splits the one Absolute Whole of Hegel into pieces...The process of development has no ends to realise which are not the ends willed by men. But those ends are not realised merely because they are willed by men...When it is willed must be determined by objective possibilities in the situation. Only when these conditions are fulfilled, can the ends willed by men be realised."

For example, socialism cannot be attained, until "the process of production has been sufficiently developed to permit of mass manufacture". Still, while there are external restraints on men, Hook doesn't regard Marx as an economic fatalist.

The Social System in Motion

Just as Marx removes God from self-consciousness and the process of history, he endorses Hegel's dialectic, but strips it of its mystical form:

"...the Marxian totality is social and limited by other totalities, while the Hegelian totality is metaphysical and unlimited."

Again, Marx focuses on the social, rather than the divine. The demystified dialectic explains the dynamics of the social system in motion:

"The extent, the strength and the rate of interaction between the polar elements within any situation depend on the specific factors involved. They cannot be deduced from the general formula of dialectical movement...

"The dialectic is primarily a social relation. Its synthesis must consequently always be effected by human activity, for the human will is part of the social whole."

Class Activity

In "Capital", Marx describes how the dialectic manifests itself in class activity and conflict:

"Through class consciousness, society attains self-consciousness. Consciousness implies activity. As a result of the activity of class consciousness, the interacting social whole becomes transformed. The class is the subject of the historical process, the carrier of the transformative principle. The social environment is the object of the historical process, the matter transformed. In changing the historical object, the subject changes itself. 'By acting on the external world and changing it, man changes his own nature.'

"Human nature, then, far from being a constant in world history, definable in terms of fixed interests and desires, becomes a variable which within limits can be modified by man's social and historical activity. 'All history is the progressive modification of human nature.'"

The Algebra of Revolution

At this point, Marx explains the role of revolution:

"The gradual changes in human nature which are the result of the evolution of the forces of production produce sudden changes in the social relations of production. Sudden changes in the social relations of production can only be effected by political revolution. In class societies, social evolution is impossible without political revolution at some point in the process."

The dialectic is "the principle of activity,...the algebra of revolution...the dialectic is the principle of social activity, its medium is the class struggle, its spearhead, in class society, the social revolution."

The dialectic gives rise to historical continuity: "Out of it arises the succession of social systems in determinate order - primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism."

The legitimation of revolution as a social and political strategy was very much an immediate response to problems facing Europe at the time.

German Idealism was perceived as quietist towards the church, the state and society. Marx said of his fellow Germans that, "out of pure respect for the Idea, they did not attempt to realise it."

In effect, a cult grew up around the Idea, but not a social movement: "Be critical of all things, but do nothing."

From Abstract to Concrete Freedom

Ironically, in his disputes with other Young Hegelians, Marx not only had to convince them of the appropriateness of revolution, but that afterwards, a social democracy was necessary. Nothing would be gained for man if one feudal, authoritarian or totalitarian state was replaced by another.

Marx countered Hegel's view that the state represented the common interests of society. The state had become a class state, the instrument by which one class imposed its interests on others: "The fulfilment of the idealism of the state is at the same time the fulfilment of the materialism of bourgeois society."

Political equality was a condition, not a guarantee, of social equality:

"Only when the real individual man has given up his abstract character as a citizen and has become truly human in his empirical life, in his individual work, in his individual relations, only when man recognises and organises his 'forces propres' as social forces and therefore no longer permits himself to be separated from them by political forms, only then has human emancipation been achieved."

Freedom has to move from the abstract to the concrete in order to benefit each individual. Social action is needed to achieve freedom.

Marx Rejoins

Marx was responding to issues in Hegel's philosophy that were relevant to 1840's German society.

At the time, Marx was in his twenties. It's not clear whether his views were conceived in his original reading of Hegel or grew out of the Auseinandersetzungen. Hook tells some of the story of the development of Marx' views via his response to Hegel directly. The rest derives from his rejoinders to the reactions of others.

By the end of the decade, a clear picture of Marx' philosophy had emerged, even if he was subsequently distracted by practical political activity and economic research (that would ultimately result in "Capital"). It's a tragedy that Marx was never able to fully return to these philosophical issues later in life.

The Antithesis of Hegel

Some commentators have said that Feuerbach played the role of antithesis to Hegel's thesis: "Feuerbach was Hegel's fate." You could infer that Marx was the synthesis.

Both Marx and Engels relied on Feuerbach to liberate themselves from Hegel, before moving away from aspects of Feuerbach upon which they differed.

Feuerbach is most remembered for his philosophy of religion. He didn't necessarily deny the existence of God: "That man created God in his own image does not detract from the value or validity of God". What he wanted to understand was the reasons for belief in God. In a way, he worked in reverse to Hegel:

"God was my first thought; Reason my second; Man my third and last."

Hook infers:

"His unending quest was to uncover the human in the supernatural, the sensible in the intelligible, the psychological in the logical, and at least as far as programme was concerned, the social in the scientific...it is an attempt to reveal the nature of man in whatever man does...The subject of divinity is Reason, but the subject of Reason is man."

Feuerbach asserted:

"The Hegelian philosophy is the last refuge, the last rational support of theology. Just as once upon a time the Catholic theologians were de facto Aristotelians in order to combat Protestantism, today the protestant theologians are de jure Hegelians in order to combat 'atheism'."

Feuerbach partly explains religion in terms of a desire for oneness or integrity:

"Down to the smallest detail, even my senses agree with this inner feeling for the undivided, for that which is at one with itself."

But equally, "no one can be at peace with himself unless he is at peace with his neighbour...The fount, medium and goal of all self-conscious human religion is love. 'A loving heart is the beat of the species throbbing in the individual.'"

Ultimately, Feuerbach sees man as the measure of all things, not God:

"The agreement of others is therefore my criterion of the normalness, the universality, the truth of my thoughts...The measure of the species is the absolute measure, law and criterion of man."

Eleven Syntheses

The last chapter analyses Marx' eleven theses on Feuerbach. They were really just notes towards a more detailed analysis, but Hook fleshes them out with the detail Marx might have arrived at if he had completed his philosophical project.

Here we get a sense of three great minds (four, including Hook) sparring across decades. At stake is the definitive response to Hegel and the genesis of a new philosophy.

United against Hegel are three philosophers who regard him as adopting a mythological form, "because the whole process was supposed to have transpired in a timeless divine Subject."

Hook concludes:

"The source of religion is to be sought in the antagonisms between the way men actually produce and the traditional, social, legal and moral forms under which that production is carried on...From these antagonisms results the fragmentation of experience, the absence of unified control of the collective lot, the worship of the abstractions which express the needs of yesterday, the contrast between an everyday self and an ideal holiday self..."

Ultimately, Marx, like Feuerbach, finds the solution in Man and Society, not Religion or God or the State.

However, in order to achieve his vision, Marx believed that Revolution was necessary.

When the revolutions occurred, the Communist States quickly embraced totalitarianism, ostensibly to protect themselves against counter-revolution.

If we will now never see Marx' vision of Man and Society, what then remains of his legacy?

It's arguable that Marx (and Feuerbach) ended the progress of German Idealism. However, this doesn't take into account the resurgence of Hegelian studies or the attempts by Zizek to synthesise Hegel's and Marx' philosophies.

Whatever the outcome, Hook captures the essence of the clash of ideas that are still reverberating three centuries later.

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly readable snapshot of 1840s neo-hegelian German philosophy, as carried out by sniping in the radical press.

Originally written in the 1930s when Hook was some kind of marxist, this edition from the period of High McCarthyism includes a "new introduction" that does not throw the book under the bus, but rather distinguishes it from the Soviet Empire, finding unlikely "the contention that socialism spells the abolition of human self-alienation" (7) and that we "may be more alienated in a highly planned socialized economy in which political democracy is absent" (8). He turns Marx against the Soviets, suggesting that "any economy in which free trade unions are lacking, the legal right to opposition non-existent, and the right to strike taboo is an economy of forced labor" (id.). Ultimately, he reasseses that "it is not the mode of economic production but the mode of political decision which is of decisve importance" (9), which is a break with marxist theory.

The principal text is great: a decent essay on Marx's debt to and critique of Hegel, and then a development of Marx's polemics with Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, Ruge, Hess, and Feuerbach, ending with a detailed reading of the theses on Feuerbach. This means that though the Manifesto is mentioned, the intellectual biography does not get there. This one concerns the maturation of historical materialist theory.

The opening essay addresses how Marx arises out of Hegel, who has "ostensibly the most conservative system of philosophy in western European tradition" (15). The analysis includes both what Marx preserves of Hegel and what gets thrown out. Hook cites to Peirce for the proposition that Hegel's dialectics "is the logic of natural continuity" (68), which is apt (and which makes sense of Foucault's later remark that his studies of discontinuity assume the truth of marxism but don't bother belaboring it). The text is otherwise content to disregard the schematic thesis-antithesis-synthesis heuristic.

Strauss is presented as an idealist (89) whose higher criticism of scripture showed that it "had no more justification than the superstitions of the Hottentots" (82), a positive development, but nevertheless "irretrievably bankrupted the Hegelian stock in the German market" (86).

Bauer is the "high-water mark of higher biblical criticism" (89) who "denied the historicity of Christ" (91), but was nonetheless destroyed by Marx as an idealist (116).

Ruge is described as "the central figure of the Young Hegelians" who presented "the political aspirations of the rising bourgeoisie in Germany" (126). Ruge started off the Hallische Jahrbucher as a Protestant rag, and then attacked the Prussian state for not being sufficiently pious (128). But it was all bullshit; his letters reveal that he was faking rightwing ideas in order to beat the censor (id.). It all came crumbling down when he dared attack romanticism. Ruge is therefore the 1840s Stephen Colbert. First as tragedy, second as farce, no?

Stirner is presented as a hyper-individualist, and I suspect that there is nothing in Ayn Rand that Stirner did not originate. Hess, on the other hand, is a "true socialist," which the Manifesto repudiates as feudal nostalgia. I have long suspected that "true socialist" theory is one part of fascism. The detailed discussion and critique of Feuerbach that concludes the volume is well done. Feuerbach is revealed by turns as very slick and very stupid.

Overall, very much a philosopher's contribution, concerned with traditional ontological and epistemological categories; politics and ethics are marginal. We should keep in mind that author eventually ended up in a subliterate rightwing thinktank during the Reagan years, becoming an unreconstructed cold warrior in his frail dotage--but this one's worthwhile.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before

[Jalmar Lange · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard read, read this on and off. Interesting subject but I don’t think I like this Sidney dude

[Traveller]

I want this so bad i can actually taste it, but it seems rather hard to get hold of...