{"id":903181,"date":"2026-09-17T16:02:56","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/?page_id=903181"},"modified":"2026-09-17T16:02:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:02:58","slug":"did-marx-not-finally-set-hegel-back-on-his-feet","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/did-marx-not-finally-set-hegel-back-on-his-feet\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Marx not finally set Hegel back on his feet?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In brief:<\/strong> The phrase about turning Hegel the right way up comes from Marx himself and describes less than it promises. What Marx takes over is Hegel\u2019s procedure; what he changes is the object. And the objection that Hegel did not know about immiseration strikes precisely the chapter in which the book is least at rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Idealism and materialism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Hegel\u2019s idealism does not mean that the world exists in one\u2019s head or is steered by a God beyond it. It means that actuality<\/a> is conceptually structured \u2013 that it develops according to determinations of its own and is therefore knowable. What Marx takes over is exactly this: the assumption that an economic order has a logic<\/em> that can be set out. It is no accident that Capital<\/em> begins with the commodity and develops money and capital out of it; that is the form of exposition of the Science of Logic<\/em>, applied to a different object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image of the head and the feet conceals this closeness. It says that Marx changes the starting point \u2013 not that he discards the procedure. Hans Friedrich Fulda has shown how far the method of exposition in Capital<\/em> remains Hegelian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Did Hegel not know about immiseration?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

He made it his subject. \u00a7 241<\/a>\u2013\u00a7 245<\/a> describe not a misfortune that befalls civil society<\/a> but a result that it produces: in \u00a7 243<\/a> the accumulation of wealth on the one side and, on the other, \u201ethe isolation and limitedness of particular labour\u201c together with \u201ethe dependence and want of the class tied to this labour\u201c. The transcripts show that Hegel knew the reports from England and discussed them in the lectures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rabble<\/a> is in him not simply the poor person but the one who, along with poverty, loses recognition and with it the ethical bond to society \u2013 in substance what is later called alienation, and what Hegel already treats in the Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em> under the title of self-externalisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the sentence with which the chapter ends:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It becomes evident, here, that, in the face of the excess of wealth<\/em>, civil society is not wealthy enough<\/em> \u2013 that is, does not possess enough, of its own peculiar resources, to check the excess of poverty and the production of the rabble.<\/p>\nGroundlines, \u00a7 245<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Hegel offers no solution for this. He works through the obvious means \u2013 support without labour, labour without demand \u2013 and shows that both enlarge the problem. Marx did not refute this diagnosis; he took it as his starting point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Interpreting and changing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is not an objection to Hegel but a decision about the task of philosophy. Hegel\u2019s counter-position stands in the Preface: philosophy \u201ealways comes too late\u201c, because it recognises a shape of life only once that shape is finished \u2013 the owl of Minerva<\/a> begins its flight with the falling of dusk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a claim about the reach of cognition, not about the permissibility of action. Whoever denies it denies that philosophy can be separated from practice \u2013 and that is exactly the dispute between Hegel and Marx. Quoting it does not settle it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. And the dialectic?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Marx applies it without explaining it; Hegel explains it. In the Groundlines<\/em> one can watch it at work: property<\/a> is a shape of the will that cannot sustain itself, because it presupposes the other will which it does not contain; wrong<\/a> is the shape in which this lack comes out; punishment is not its removal but the restoration of right upon it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What one does not<\/em> find there is the scheme thesis\u2013antithesis\u2013synthesis. It comes from Heinrich Moritz Chalyb\u00e4us (1837) and was fastened on Hegel from outside; he himself speaks of determinate negation<\/a> and of sublation<\/a>. The difference is not terminological: a determinate negation is the negation of this<\/em> matter and retains its content; a scheme into which anything at all can be inserted retains nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing is lost for understanding Marx by seeing this. Whoever reads Hegel finds an \u201eidealist\u201c who judged civil society more soberly than most of the materialists of his time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See also Hans Friedrich Fulda, \u201eDialektik als Darstellungsmethode im \u201aKapital\u2018 von Marx\u201c, in: Ajatus<\/em>, Helsinki 1978, pp. 180\u2013216 (full text, in German<\/a>) \u2013 as well as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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