Hegel’s Dialectics and Marx’s Dialectics: The Dialectics of Social History

October 2021

Author: Liu Bingjing

The article is from the Journal of “Chronicles of Social Critical Theory (Volume 8)”

In the study of Marxist dialectics, the relationship between Hegel’s dialectics and Marx’s dialectics has always been the focus of many scholars. Most traditional studies believe that Marx discovered the rational core in the mysterious shell of Hegel’s dialectics and turned it upside down, thus completing the transformation of Hegel’s objective idealism dialectics and forming the scientific dialectics of historical materialism.

The first volume of Marx’s Capital successfully borrowed the conceptual framework of Hegel’s dialectics to express his dialectical method. This judgment is of course correct, but such an abstract understanding often makes dialectics and Marx’s revolutionary transformation of Hegel’s dialectics an abstract formula far from reality. Accordingly, we rarely pay attention to how Marx could accurately understand and successfully reverse Hegel’s dialectics. This secret is deeply hidden in Hegel and Marx’s research on the dialectical movement of social history. This article starts from this perspective and tries to show in detail how Marx could understand and reverse Hegel’s dialectics, and reflect on the relationship between Hegel and Marx’s dialectics.

Part  1

In Hegel’s view, dialectics is the principle of movement of concepts. Concepts transcend themselves in the progress of their own internal contradictions and achieve new unity. However, dialectics is not an abstract form separated from content. It is a universal principle generated based on objective historical reality, revealing the objective internal connection between the movement and development of things. It was in the political economics research of social reality that Hegel gradually developed the dialectics of social history to grasp the changes of the times. This is also an important premise for Marx to understand Hegel’s dialectics later. Therefore, by reviewing the political economics research on which Hegel’s dialectics is based, we can understand more specifically how Hegel’s dialectics emerged, developed and matured based on social and historical reality. Here, we will grasp Hegel’s dialectics from the three stages of Hegel’s research on political economy: the Frankfurt period, the Jena period and the mature period.

First, during the Frankfurt period (1797-1801), from the perspective of social history, this was also the period when the British Industrial Revolution was completed. Hegel began to pay attention to modern industrial society and political economics from the perspective of religious thought. In 1799, Hegel had already carefully read the works of John Stuart Mill and wrote a long review (later lost) on the German translation of Stuart’s Principles of Political Economy, which was mainly about the increase of individual freedom in commercial society, the development of new integrity and community, etc. [1] Therefore, even in Hegel’s early religious research, he had already recognized the objective and abstract role of ownership and property in political economy in the unity of opposites between subject and object, particularity and universality, and regarded them as necessary links in his dialectics of life.

Since Kant, the relationship between subject and object has been troubling German philosophers. The contradiction between human intellectual ability to grasp experience and moral imperatives beyond experience, which Kant put forward in his three critical works, truly reflects the modern contradiction between human practical activities and moral activities after the rise of modern civil society. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel all followed this clue. In articles such as The Spirit and Fate of Christianity, German Legal System and Fragments of the System of 1800, Hegel recorded the reality of universal alienation of people in modern society. Specifically, Hegel has seen that ownership and property are the objectification of life, the necessary link for life to rise from finiteness to infinity, and have an objective and abstract role in social life. However, under the legal system of the real country, people are incomplete and divided only in terms of ownership. Hegel believes that this reality is opposed to the complete human state in the real church. “State law deals entirely with specific rights, and does not treat people as individuals with property. On the contrary, in the church, people are indeed a whole. The church, as a visible church that acts and creates facilities, aims to provide and maintain this sense of wholeness.”[2] At this time, Hegel realized that ownership and property rights are the medium of universal relations between people, and are also the source of the internal contradictions of modern society. He has not yet discovered the important role of socialized labor and exchange behind ownership.

It is worth noting that Hegel did not completely deny the rationality of reality, but gradually realized the universal role of ownership and its legal rights in individual life. “The affirmation of existing things is a negation of natural nature. Its truth, that is, it can be legal rights, can be retained… Now one way is to start from the truth that existing things can also recognize, and then understand the various local concepts included in the concept of the whole state as local concepts of universality in thought, and put the universality or particularity of these concepts on a par with these concepts in reality.” [3] On this basis, Hegel found a way of dialectical fusion of subject and object in the “1800 System Fragments” from the unity of opposites between the overall development of human nature and the reality of the division of modern society – life. As a finite life, man does not enter the infinity of religion on the basis of abandoning all objective things, but “life will be liberated from objective things, and let the suppressed things have their own life or be reborn.” [4] In Hegel’s abstract philosophical terms, life is the dialectical unity of subjectivity and objectivity, individuality and universality, matter and spirit, finite and infinite. This is also the actual prototype of Hegel’s thought of negation and negation of negation.

Of course, at this time Hegel only extracted simple dialectical ideas of the unity of opposites between subjectivity and objectivity, particularity and universality, and negation of negation from social, economic and political activities. His focus was still on religious thought, and he had not yet reached dialectical thinking on the nature of bourgeois society. Therefore, the dialectical content of social history was relatively small and unsystematic.

Second, the Jena period (1801-1807) was the period when Hegel focused on studying classical political economy. During the Frankfurt period, Hegel had already incorporated the ownership issue in capitalist economic life into his dialectical thinking on social development, and around 1800, Hegel had begun to come into contact with the political economics of Adam Smith and others. In 1803-1804, after carefully studying Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Hegel made comments in his Jena Notes. On the basis of these studies on political economy, Hegel described the social dialectics based on modern labor in his works such as System of Ethics and Philosophy of Nature and Spirit (1803-1805, 1805-1806), and described how individuals rose from individuality to universality through the education of labor, and then formed a universal personality characterized by ownership and property rights, and formed universal connections in economic activities. At this time, Hegel had consciously extracted the dialectics of social history based on the real movement of civil society to realize his ethical conception of modern society.

First, from the perspective of labor in general, Hegel pointed out that labor is a process of subject-object unity achieved by individuals under the guidance of ideas. “Labor makes itself a thing.” [5] Labor is a process of subject-object unity achieved by individuals under the guidance of purposeful ideas, which frees people from animal intuition. Through the mediation of labor and tools, individuals can achieve the unity of spirit and nature. However, this is only the abstract role of non-historical labor. Hegel then emphasized the dialectical movement of social labor. In the commodity economy, individuals no longer work to meet their own needs. “The content of his labor exceeds his needs. He works for the needs of the majority, and everyone is like this… There is no concrete labor. His power lies in analysis and abstraction, splitting the concrete world into many abstract aspects.” [6] Not only is social labor abstract, but the subject of labor has also become a universal personality in the market economy. In addition, the universal establishment of social labor and division of labor system, the surplus and exchange of labor products, have established universal ownership and made mutual recognition (contract and law) between subjects possible.

The universality that Hegel describes here, which spontaneously forms in civil society, is exactly what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand”. But Hegel is not satisfied with this. He believes that the universal connection based on commodity economy is still external, abstract, and unified. The contracts and laws based on it are also abstract and formal. In this regard, he objectively describes the various contradictions existing in civil society. At the beginning, he mentions the negative role of the social labor system. Hegel admits that socialized labor and production make people universally connected through exchange and greatly expand people’s universal needs. But on the other hand, “he becomes – through the abstraction of labor – more mechanical, more dull, and spiritless… His boring work limits him to an isolated point, and the more perfect his work is, the more one-sided it is.” [7] Specialized and socialized labor inevitably reduces people to abstract and one-sided social existence, becoming an accidental link in social relations. Moreover, when abstract labor reaches its peak, a huge contradiction is formed between social wealth and poverty. “The highest degree of abstraction of labor permeates more individual modes and thus constantly expands its scope. The inequality between wealth and poverty, a necessity and necessity, turns into an extremely divided will, inner anger and hatred.”[8] Correspondingly, the legal system built on it is both a manifestation of the universal will and has the shortcomings of intellectual abstraction. Therefore, Hegel proposed that the role of the state must be brought into play and that the new ethical unity must be reconnected on the basis of the unity of the individual and the whole in order to get out of the predicament of modern society.

It is worth noting that Hegel has organically linked labor and self-consciousness together, and the spiritual essence of man is realized in labor. The establishment of self-consciousness and spiritual philosophy as the internal driving force of dialectics reflects that Hegel has realized that the reality of civil society provides objective abstraction and its contradictory movement for dialectics, and the objective law of absolute spirit constantly realizing itself can only be realized on the basis of economic activities. At this time, Hegel initially organically unified the objective activities of reality and the abstract categories of dialectics, which was more systematically elaborated in his mature works.

Third, Hegel in his mature period (1807-1831) accurately pointed out the essential characteristics of civil society in his works such as “Small Logic” and “Principles of Right Philosophy”. During the Jena period, Hegel’s social and historical dialectical thought was mainly based on labor, and these ideas were eventually integrated into Hegel’s dialectics of civil society. Most importantly, in his understanding of the dialectical laws of civil society, Hegel achieved the dialectical unity of logic and history, and organically integrated the dialectical movement of social and historical reality into the conceptual system of dialectics.

In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes in detail the nature of civil society and regards this historical stage as a necessary link in the ethical entity. The historical significance of civil society lies in that it is a limited stage “formed in the modern world”. It is constantly developing towards an ethical entity in the internal contradictory movement of mutual dependence, mutual transformation and mutual separation between particularity and universality. Because everyone in civil society is essentially a special existence, all his needs and preferences are satisfied and expanded, and the realization of this particularity is constrained by the universality. “The particular person is essentially related to other such particularities, so each particular person affirms himself and is satisfied through the mediation of others and unconditionally through the mediation of the form of universality. This universal form is another principle of civil society.” [9] However, in essence, “when my particularity is still a determinant, that is, when it is still an end for me, I also serve the universality because of this. It is this universality that ultimately controls me.” [10] Therefore, in Hegel’s view, civil society is ultimately just the phenomenal world of ethical entities, and it will inevitably overcome division in the contradictory movement between particularity and universality. In other words, the dialectic of civil society is the ethical entity constantly realizing its own development.

It is not difficult to see that Hegel’s description here reflects the objective abstraction in the economic structure unique to civil society. Everyone pursues his own special purpose in labor and exchange, but instead forms an objective social relationship that is not subject to personal will. Everyone must realize himself in objective social relations through abstract intermediaries such as commodities and money, and eventually become a link under the rule of social relations. This objective social relationship is invisible and colorless, and only occurs in people’s practical activities such as production and exchange, but it becomes the universal intermediary for everyone to realize themselves and structures people’s entire lives. This is both the “invisible hand” spontaneously formed in Adam Smith’s market economy and the real realization of Hegel’s absolute spirit. Hegel has seen that although civil society has great historical rationality, the identity structure spontaneously formed in the commodity economy has become an abstract force that dominates individuals. However, Hegel said that this is just a realistic intermediary for the cunning of reason to realize itself. The historical limitations of civil society will be negated in the objective movement of absolute spirit and return to the identity of state and law. Therefore, the dialectical movement of the particularity and universality formed by civil society itself has become the objective intermediary for the absolute spirit to realize itself, and the alienation of absolute spirit in reality is the economic identity of civil society. Abstract logic and real history are organically unified, becoming the objective premise for the establishment of Hegel’s dialectics. In this regard, Hegel wrote: Dialectics “is not only about producing the determination of boundaries and opposites, but also about producing and grasping the positive content and results of such determinations. Only in this way can dialectics be development and internal progress. Secondly, this dialectic is not an external activity of subjective thinking, but an inherent soul of the content, which organically grows its branches and fruits.” [11] Therefore, Hegel’s dialectics is not a product of subjective thinking. The process of modern economic movement itself is objective and abstract, and it unfolds dialectically. The dialectical activity of social history provides a realistic basis for the inherent and inevitable laws of dialectics.

From the perspective of Hegel’s research on political economy, Hegel’s dialectical thought, especially the dialectics of social history, benefited from Hegel’s thorough observation of the real activities of bourgeois society. Hegel unified the dialectical movement of social history with the logical operation of dialectics, and provided a unique philosophical method to solve the reality of the internal division of modern society with the dialectical movement of concepts. Therefore, even if Hegel’s dialectical thought is ultimately an objective idealist structure of the development of absolute spirit, it still presents Hegel’s in-depth understanding and thinking of bourgeois real life. This is also an important premise for Marx to finally understand Hegel’s dialectics.

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