In brief: In the most important case – the economy – the charge does not hold: Hegel did not overlook the self-movement of civil society but was the first to describe it as necessary, together with the contradiction it cannot resolve. With the natural sciences the case is different: there philosophy does not lay claim to that self-movement at all.
1. The economy: diagnosed, not underestimated
§ 243–§ 246 are the place. § 243 describes how, along with the accumulation of wealth, „the dependence and want of the class tied to this labour“ grows. § 244 calls the result the rabble and notes that its emergence „brings with it, at the same time, the greater ease of concentrating disproportionate wealth in a few hands“. And § 245 draws the balance:
It becomes evident, here, that, in the face of the excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough – that is, does not possess enough, of its own peculiar resources, to check the excess of poverty and the production of the rabble.
Groundlines, § 245
That is no marginal remark but an aporia: Hegel examines both conceivable remedies – direct support and the provision of work – and rejects both, the first because it detaches subsistence from labour, the second because it enlarges the overproduction in which the evil consists. The system fails on itself, and he says so.
The difference from Marx therefore lies not in the diagnosis but in the conclusion. Marx knew this analysis precisely and carried it further; his conclusion is the abolition of civil society. Hegel’s answer is mediation through the corporation and the state (§ 250–§ 256, § 257 ff.) – an answer whose adequacy can be disputed and which he himself does not present as a resolution of the contradiction.
What Hegel could not know is the empirical escalation: the global industrial capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The logical structure he had.
2. The natural sciences: a category mistake on both sides
Here the charge demands something Hegel does not claim. The philosophy of nature is not a better physics; it presupposes empirical research (Encyclopaedia § 246 note), and Hegel expressly calls it „utterly improper“ to demand of the concept that it construct the contingencies of nature (§ 250 note). The self-movement of the particular sciences is therefore not underestimated but not disputed at all.
What philosophy lays claim to are the determinations with which the particular sciences work without examining them – causality, force, law, life, end. More fully: Is Hegel’s claim to a system across all the sciences not presumptuous?
3. Where the charge does hit
At two points, and there plainly. In § 249 note the philosophy of nature denies that the sequence of stages in nature is a history in time – an addition his own procedure did not require, and one the theory of evolution has refuted (see Is Hegel’s philosophy of nature the Achilles heel of the system?). And the construction of the state in § 272–§ 286 considerably underestimates the self-movement of political life: parties, associations, mass media and a bureaucracy with interests of its own do not appear there, or are treated as a disturbance.
The principle – that each sphere has its own immanent movement and that the task is to comprehend it rather than to regulate it – is untouched by this. It is precisely the principle that allows those mistakes to be named.
Sources. Groundlines § 182–§ 187, § 189–§ 208 (the system of needs), § 241–§ 248 (poverty, rabble, colonisation), § 250–§ 256 (the corporation), § 272–§ 286. – Encyclopaedia (1830) § 246 note, § 249 note, § 250 note. – On the aporia of poverty compare Hegel’s own lecture transcripts on § 244 f. as well as Karl Marx, Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts (1843). – In the glossary: Civil Society, Poverty, The Rabble, Police and Corporation.