Hegel and Marx – To Comprehend and to Change

Whether to follow Hegel or Marx is the wrong question. This book asks what each of them achieves and how to use both together if you want to explain the world to yourself.

The common story goes: Hegel derived the world from thought, Marx turned him from his head onto his feet. The story stems in its outlines from Marx himself, the image of the feet from Engels. This book sets against it what Marx actually does. As early as 1837 the nineteen-year-old writes to his father that “the reason of the thing itself” must “roll onward as something in conflict within itself” – Hegel’s basic methodological demand, six years before he turns it against Hegel’s philosophy of right. Whoever believes they must decide between the two loses half the toolkit.

The book presupposes nothing and explains on the spot what it needs. It is not a biography, not taking sides in a dispute between schools and not an overview of interpretations of Marx; it examines texts and says of every objection where it hits and where it does not.

Structure

Part I shows where Marx’s procedure comes from: from his training in Berlin under Savigny and above all under Eduard Gans. Part II reads the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right of 1843, the inversion of subject and predicate that Marx takes over from Feuerbach, and takes stock: four points at which Marx hits Hegel, and what he does not hit. Part III deals with the self-clarification of the years 1844 to 1846: the Paris Manuscripts, the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, whose statements about its own method the book separates from Marx’s actual analyses. Part IV asks what becomes of the procedure in Capital, from the beginning with the commodity to value as “automatic subject”. Part V lays out the toolkit: what Hegel supplies, what Marx supplies, why neither suffices alone, what does not hold and where the limit of both lies.

What is special

The book measures both by the same rule. Marx accuses Hegel of making an abstraction into an acting subject, and himself falls into this in Capital when value begins to act. From this the book gains rules for reading and use: where Marx hits Hegel’s diction or Prussian institutions, he mostly hits; where he thinks he is hitting the method, he is working with it. At the end stands a symmetrical formula: knowing without practice is empty, practice without knowing is blind. And a limit that concerns both: that a system works in a logically coherent way does not yet say that it is good.

Relation to the other books

What Hegel’s philosophy of right undertakes as a whole is developed in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – How Freedom Becomes Real; the logical structures with which this book works are set out in Hegel’s Logic – Logic of Thinking. How Feuerbach and Marx inverted Hegel’s philosophy of religion is shown from Hegel’s side in Hegel’s Philosophy of Absolute Spirit – How Spirit Comes to Know Itself. Why a conviction that no finding can touch no longer checks anything is developed in Truth. What is to be made of Marx’s economics today is examined in Capitalism — An Introduction (in preparation).

Bibliography

Year

2026

Edition

Hegel Interpretations Edition · Reception and Influence

Licence

Copyright

Where to buy

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Price: 9.90 EUR/USD

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