Abstract
Some 30 years ago, David MacGregor published his first book on Hegel and Marx. His argument was controversial: while Marx’s debt to Hegel was widely acknowledged, MacGregor suggested that the nature of the debt had been misunderstood. The idea that Marx had simply turned Hegel the right way up was one that derived from Marx and Engels, but it glorified the revolutionary Marx against the dark background of an allegedly reactionary Hegel. In doing so, it both fundamentally misrepresented Hegel and at the same time gave an inaccurate account of Marx. According to MacGregor, Hegel was in reality even more radical than Marx: like Marx he believed that bourgeois property relations were essentially exploitative, which led him to outline the vision of nothing less than a communist society in his Philosophy of Right. The puzzle was that neither Marx nor virtually any other subsequent commentator had apparently recognized Hegel’s radical critique of capitalist private property.
These questions are revisited in a most welcome new edition of MacGregor’s 1998 study Hegel and Marx After the Fall of Communism. It offers an accessible version of the ideas developed in two earlier books and a series of stimulating reflections on the relevance of Hegel and Marx at the end of the twentieth century. The new edition is enhanced by an Afterword which previews arguments developed in the context of a new on-going project on Hegel and the American Revolution. MacGregor begins by examining what Marx and Engels wrote about the relationship between Hegel and Marx before moving on to analyse, firstly, Lukács’ view that Hegel gradually abandoned his early radical liberalism to become a craven apologist for Prussian tyranny and, secondly, Althusser’s argument that Hegel’s impact on Marx was minimal. The next three chapters focus on Hegel as a radical. His youthful discussions of Christ and Christianity, MacGregor argues, laid the foundation for a life-long preoccupation with democratic politics. His association with Hölderlin and Sinclair brought him into contact with German followers of Tom Paine, to whose ideas on the separation of civil society and the state and the nature of democratic politics his own thinking bore a great similarity. In Berlin, despite the constraints of censorship, he and his colleague Eduard Gans pondered the causes of poverty – the greatest social and political problem of the time – and ways to end it. The final three chapters explore the ideas that Gans may have transmitted to the young Marx in his lectures of the late 1830s. Here MacGregor elucidates Hegel’s view of private property and the democratic corporation as the HereHere answer to the problem of property, his notion of a developing order to liberal democracy and, finally, Hegel’s ideas considered from the point of view of their relevance to the period of transition after the fall of communism.
To a sceptical reader it might appear that MacGregor relies heavily on supposition. Hegel never met either Paine or even Paine’s leading German disciple, Georg Forster; Paine is never once mentioned in any of Hegel’s lectures or writings. Moreover Hegel concealed his radicalism well. Do the hints that MacGregor finds in Hegel’s 1818–19 Heidelberg lectures, only rediscovered in the 1980s, really reveal a radical democrat thwarted a few months later by the imposition of strict state censorship following the student unrest of 1819? Finally, how do we know what Marx actually gained from Gans’ lectures in Berlin?
Readers of the first edition had to take a great deal on trust. Now, in the Afterword, we have the first fruits of MacGregor’s new research on Hegel and the American Revolution, which makes fascinating reading. The inaccuracy of Marx’s reading of Hegel is related to the conflict between the two major early nineteenth-century systems of socio-economic analysis. On the one hand, the cosmopolitan British school led by Adam Smith advocated free trade. On the other hand, the national political economy school, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1791 and advocated in Germany by Friedrich List, championed state-directed economic development. Marx subscribed to the former. He regarded Britain as the leading economy in a cosmopolitan world, and had little interest in the national developments that had transformed the United States and which from the 1860s took shape in Russia, Germany and Japan.
In List’s thinking about America and about the national political economy that he advocated for Europe, MacGregor argues, Hegel’s ideas found a more fruitful development. The supposition here is that Hegel had a life-long interest in the United States, even though he wrote very little on the subject. The puzzle is solved, MacGregor suggests, if we realize that, at crucial stages, List’s career intersected with Hegel’s life and that Hegel was aware of List’s ideas and approved of them as an antidote to influence of Adam Smith. For the very same reason, both Marx and Engels loathed List with a vengeance. Hegel was guilty by association with List and hence he was edited out of Marx’s story. Ironically, it was Hegel who ultimately triumphed. In the early twenty-first century the main challenges to the supremacy of the West come from the resurgence of Russia and China, both countries where national political economy is practised along lines envisaged by Hegel and List, albeit without the respect for human rights that both thinkers took for granted.
David MacGregor’s fine book should be read not only by students and scholars of Hegel and Marx, but by anyone interested in the political–economic system of the modern world. It is a wonderfully thought-provoking work of intellectual history and contemporary commentary.