Hegel In Marx: Accounts And Misinterpretations

8 Pages 1897 Words

The system Karl Marx developed follows Hegel’s account of the dialectical structure of history. Hegelian thought was the most important and influential philosophical thought of Marx’s time. Marx is considered to be part of the left Hegelian thought; members here made use of Hegel’s ideas in order to work against Hegel himself. Marx criticizes Hegel for being an idealist in that Hegel views the basis of everything as a self-consciousness of which everything else follows. Marx uses Hegel’s dialectic but turns it against Hegel because for Marx, the starting point is materiality, from which everything else follows. Even though Marx felt his dialectic is vastly different from his predecessor, in many respects Hegel and Marx were in alignment with each other due to misinterpretations on Marx’s part. Even though Hegel’s economic market in civil society contains many characteristics of capitalism, Hegel realizes the possibility for the problems in a free market similar to that of Marx; ultimately Hegel’s remedies for these problems cannot be accepted by Marx.

Marx retains the same philosophical schema of Hegel in that human history follows a logical progress, but has a different starting point and path for history. Instead of history starting with god and consciousness that follows its telos of absolute truth, Marx believes that history starts with materiality and advances toward the emancipation of humans; “history is the true natural history of man” (M 156). Moreover, Marx uses Hegel’s dialectic in describing this progress of history; “the concept’s moving principle, which alike engenders and dissolves the particularizations of the universal” (H §31 34). The dialectic is essentially a way of explaining how progress occurs through contradiction and struggle. The dialectic is an accruement whereby one reaches point of opposition, overcomes those barriers, and transcends while retaining the positive f...