Hegel, Marx, and the Concept of Immanent Critique

Abstract

Hegel, Marx, and the Concept of Immanent Critique ANDREW BUCHWALTER WITH OTHERS, MARXcriticizes Hegel's Philosophyof Right for its apologetic stance regarding the status quo. For Marx as well, Hegel's political thought dogmatically assigns rationality to existing social and political reality. Unlike many critics, however, Marx does not consider Hegel's so-called attitude of accommodation to be simply a moral failing or an expression of political cowardice.' He does not follow Arnold Ruge in accusing Hegel of betraying essentially critical principles in order to curry favor with state authorities.2 In Marx's view, Hegel's conservatism is rooted in the innermost structure of his thought.3 Because the PhilosophyofRightis conceived as part of a metaphysical system based on the identity of reason and reality, it necessarily sanctifies existing political arrangements. "There can no longer be any question about an act of accommodation on Hegel's part vis-a-vis.., the state, etc., since this lie is the lie of his principle."4 Marx was not alone in arguing that the purported conservatism of Hegelian politics is rooted in a speculative identity philosophy. In his t857 Hegel undseineZeit,Rudolph Haym marshalled similar arguments to criticize a political philosophy that, for him, represented the "scientific lodging of the spirit of As he writes in his 1841 doctoral dissertation: "it is mere ignorance on the part of his [Hegel's] pupils, when they explain one or the other determination of his system by his desire for accommodation and the like, hence, in one word, explain it in terms of morality" (The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Richard Tucker, 2d ed. [New York: Norton, t978], 9). ' Arnold Ruge, "Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' and the Politics of Our Times," in Lawrence S. Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, t983), 211-36. s See Karl-Heinz Ilting, "Hegel's Concept of the State and Marx's Early Critique," in Z. A. Pelczynski, ed., The State and Civil Society(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 93- l 134 The Marx-Engels Reader, 118f. As he writes in his dissertation: Hegel's "apparent accommodation has its deepest roots in an inadequacy of or in an inadequate formulation of his principle itself" (Marx-Engels Werke 2,~ [Berlin: Dietz, 198o], 64). [253] 254 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:2 APRIL t99I the Prussian restoration."s For Haym as well, Hegel's speculative equation of reason and reality was "the absolute formula of political conservatism.''6 Unlike Haym, however, Marx does not finger the conjunction of reason and reality as itself the source of Hegelian dogmatism. The conservatism entailed by Hegel's identity philosophy does not derive from a failure to distinguish between what is and what rationally ought to be, between fact and value.7 Far from criticizing Hegel on this score, Marx actually appropriates Hegel's principle of the homogeneity of reason and reality when formulating his own account of normative theory,s For Marx, Hegel's conjunction of thought and being furnished the methodological parameters for a concept of social criticism which avoids the dichotomy of descriptive and prescriptive analysis. Marx calls this immanent critique. Unlike the utopian forms of criticism identifiable with anarchists, Young Hegelians, Kantians, and naturallaw theorists, immanent critique evaluates reality not with alien principles of rationality but with those intrinsic to reality itself. An immanent approach to social criticism exposes the way reality conflicts not with some "transcendent" concept of rationality but with its own avowed norms. In Hegelian speculation Marx found the rudiments of an objective or "scientific" approach to critical theory, one in which reality is challenged not with arbitrary constructions but with norms whose acknowledged validity is part and parcel of reality itself.9 What Marx did find objectionable in Hegel's principle of the unity of reason and reality was not the principle itself but its dogmatic formulation. Invoking Feuerbach's claim that Hegel inverts subject and predicate, Marx argues that Hegel subordinates the conjunction of reason and reality to the requirements of a metaphysical system which twists what is critical into a philosophical benediction of existing social-political conditions. Hegel does not focus on the disparity between reality and its...

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