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I
Man's "alienation" was Marx's major concern in his Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts, written in Paris in 1844 but unknown and
unpublished until 1932. Marx recognized his indebtedness to Hegel and
praised The Phenomenologyof Mind for seeing "wealth, state-power, etc.
as things estranged from man's nature," albeit only in "thought-form,"
and for dealing with the estrangement of man "in a manner often sur-
passing the Hegelian standpoint."2 The part of The Phenomenologywhich
193
seems to have attracted him most was not, as one might assume with
Marcuse and MacIntyre,3 the section on "Lordship and Bondage" but
rather the section which concentrates on "wealth" and "state-power,"
namely, "Spirit in Self-Estrangement: the Discipline of Culture and
Civilization."
The very existence of culture, according to Hegel, "as also the actuality
of self-consciousness, depends on the process that self-consciousness divests
itself of its personality, by doing so creates its world, and treats it as some-
thing alien and external of which it must now take possession." 4 Culture
thus manifests the development of mind through a movement of alienation
and reappropriation. But this movement is not, Hegel insists, "formal,"
as when we see that laws apply universally to persons. Rather, it is
"concrete and actual," an experienced social development through which
"state-power" and "wealth" become the opposite of what they super-
ficially seem to be. "State-power" is not simply an externally "bad"
restriction or coercion but reveals itself as a source of self-fulfillment.
"Wealth" is not simply an extrinsic "good" as individual enjoyment but
rather becomes something which can be used for all since basically it is
"the continuously created result of the labor and action of all."
While the self finds in state-power and wealth its own social action, it
does this through the medium of language wherein the particular "ego"
becomes objective through others. Here state-power becomes "nobility"
to be obeyed, wealth generates "flattery," and there arises a sophisticated,
inverted form of discourse which seems dishonest to those who see only the
surface of things. Culture breeds the vanity which can "chatter about
everything" as in the 18th century salons. But such chatter is really
important, Hegel insists, because it sees the contradiction in things and
"knows everything to be estranged from itself." Hegel's quotations
indicate that he is thinking of the title-character in Rameau's Nephew,
Diderot's famed dialogue. Rameau's nephew does indeed chatter about
everything, but as he describes the indignities he experiences in his quest
for social status, he reveals that the virtues and vices of his social betters
are really the opposite of what they seem to be. In a moment of self-
contempt he confesses that he really has no idea of who or what he is at
bottom.5 In Hegel's view, Rameau's nephew epitomizes the aspect of
MEGA - ed. D. Ryazanov, V. Adoratski (Moscow, 1931-) Abt. I, Bd. 3, pp. 155ff.]
The notes which follow will indicate the source in German along with the English
translationwhere the originalwordingis crucialor where I have retranslated.
3 Cf. Marcuse,op. cit., p. 115; MacIntyre, Op.cit., p. 25.
4 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York, 1931),
pp. 507-48, the sourceof the subsequentdiscussionand quotations.
5 Diderot, Rameau'sNephewand OtherWorks,trans. J. Barzun and R. Bowen (New
York, 1956), pp. 16, 47-51, et pa88iM.
culture in which the estrangement of the self comes to a climax. For here
the self, standing outside state-power and wealth, deviously recognizes
them as its own doing. Here, Hegel concludes, the self becomes aware of its
"torn and shattered condition; and in knowing this it has ipso facto risen
above that condition." Thus alienation is overcome through knowledge.
Marx was also attracted to Rameau's Nephew. In the game of "con-
fessions" he played with his daughters he named Diderot his favorite prose
writer. Engels' book on Diihring's Revolution in Science, written in colla-
boration with Marx, particularly praised Rameau's Nephew as a "master-
piece of dialectics." 6 More directly, Hegel's discussion of alienation was
centered on the very issues with which Marx was preoccupied in 1844,
namely, "state-power" and "wealth." Between 1842 and 1844, as we shall
see later, Marx had used Hegel's theory of the state as a point of departure
for developing his own view in several articles and in a long, unpublished
analysis of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. As a result of his contact with
French socialists, which began with his exile from Germany to Paris in
1843, he turned to an intensive study of economics. In the views of the
classical economists, particularly in Ricardo's labor theory of value, he
found confirmation of Hegel's view that wealth is "the created result of
the labor and action of all." But, with Hegel, he saw this as part of a wider
phenomenon. He followed Hegel's more general suggestion that culture
and civilization are the result of alienation in "labor and action." Thus he
wrote in the Manuscripts:
The great thing in Hegel's Phenomenologyand its final result - the dialectic of
negativity as the moving and productiveprinciple- is simply that Hegel graspsthe
self-development of man as a process, self-loss in the object as objectification, as
alienation and the overcomingof this alienation; that he thus grasps the nature of
workand comprehendsobjective man, real because active, as the result of his own
work.7
Marx especially respected the social and historical - the "concrete and
actual" - character of Hegel's view of labor. The "great thing" in The
Phenomenology included the insight that the development of man's
specifically human capacities is "only possible through the collective
activity of men, only as a result of history." Here is the core of the social
theory identified with Marx's name: the basis of civilization is labor, a
social-historical process with dialectic as its "productive principle."
II
Every word of praise Marx had for Hegel's view of alienation, however,
6 Marx and Engels, Literatureand Art (New York, 1947), pp. 145, 79 f.; Engels,
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific [from Eugen Diihring's Revolutionin Science]trans.
E. Aveling (New York, 1935), p. 45.
7 P. 151; MEGA,I, 3, p. 156.
setting limits to the action of state, class, political party, or any other
social institution. In this respect one might well say, as is frequently done,
that Marx was a "child of the Enlightenment," a proponent of the "princi-
ples of 1789" who sought to substantiate that emphasis on the individual
person and his self-direction which characterizes liberal democracy.13-
III
13 This side of Marx's thought has appeared at a number of points in the socialist
movement - for example, in Bernstein's "revisionism"which attacked Marx'sreliance
on Hegel and viewed socialismas extending the moral aims of liberal democracy,in the
"back to Kant" movement of continental socialists, and the views of W. E. Walling
who, in the heydey of Americansocialism around 1910, opposed "society as God" and
based his oppositionto "absolutism"on John Dewey's deferenceto "the concretething
as experienced." Today an increasing number of socialists believe that preoccupation
with consumptionand income-distributionneglects society's most important product -
the kind of men it produces.Accordinglythey revive Marx'spreoccupationwith "alien-
ated labor" and concentrate on transformationof work. See, particularly, E. Fromm,
The Sane Society (New York, 1955), VIII; D. Bell, "The 'Rediscovery' of Alienation,"
Journal of Philosophy.,54 (1959), pp. 950-52.
14 Economicand PhilosophicManuscripts,pp. 121 f., 126, 160; MEGA,1, 3, pp. 109 f.
114, 156. Cf. A. C. MacIntyre, Marxism, pp. 68 f. too sharply separating the "moral"
import of The Manuscriptsfrom the "historicalprediction"of The GermanIdeology.
15 Cf. The GermanIdeology, trans. R. Pascal (New York, 1939), pp. 33-8, 154 f.,
197-9 ("Theseson Feuerbach").
16 Cf. Hegel, Philosophyof Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1942), Sec. 135; Marx,
"Die Deutsche Ideologie," MEGA, I, 5, pp. 175-78; Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach(New
York 1941), p. 30. "Manmakes his own history," Marxwrote in 1852, "but he does not
make it out of whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but
out of such as he finds close at hand."
17 Friihschriften,pp. 7 f., 3, 168 ff. Cf. ibid., pp. 12 f., 16 ff., preparatorynotes for
Marx's doctoral dissertation defining "praxis" as (i) theoretical in "criticism" which
"apprehendsthe inadequacy of existence to essence, specific actuality to the Idea" and
(ii) as the realizationof Hegel's completedphilosophy.
18 The Holy Family, p. 51 f.; Die Heilige Familie, p. 137. Marx, "On the Critiqueof
Hegel's Philosophy of Right," SelectedEssays, p. 29. Cf. Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts,p. 82.
19 The GermanIdeology,pp. 70-75, 22-27.
20 "Kritik der Hegelschen Staatsphilosophie,"Die Friihschri/ten,pp. 59-62, 46-50.
Cf. "On the Jewish Question," SelectedEssays, pp. 76 ff.
IV
Convinced that the dialectical process of history itself entails the end of
man's alienation, Marx adopted positions which undercut the humanistic
side of his thought inspired by Feuerbach and his adherence to the
"principle of subjectivity." He made man's alienation simply a present
fact and his reconciliation a future fact. To set his own view apart from
"utopianism" he insisted that socialist "preach no morals" and "have no
ideals to realize." In thus identifying what "ought to be" with the move-
ment of history, he not only deprived himself of the moral leverage for
criticizing history which was implicit in his humanism but also provided a
justification for anything and everything that happens, no matter how
cruel or inhuman. When the "collective activity of men" and the "results
of history" become the final arbiter of all human action, there is no ground
for setting limits to the action of the state or any other social institution
through the principle that man is an end in himself restricting the use of
all means. Such a principle, Marx suggested, is "abstract" and "impotent."
By comparison, the "results of history" are indeed concrete and potent,
but if they are the only test of what "ought to be," then anything and
everything that happens is morally justified.
As Marx identified the end of man's alienation with the "real movement"
of history, he came to emphasize its independence from men's actions,
likened its laws to those of nature which work with "iron necessity towards
inevitable results," and viewed it as a dialectical relation of classes and
entities such as "proletariat," "civil society," and "bourgeoisie." Within
this perspective, especially in terms of achieving class power, "the State"
as such becomes important. Though Marx, as we saw, endorsed the
"producers' self-government" of the Paris Commune, he also continued to
view socialism as he had in the Manifesto, as the exercise of centralized
state-power, lamenting to Engels that Proudhon's followers wanted to
make a company of communes "but not a State." This direction in Marx's
thought gave first place precisely to those features of Hegel's system
which, under Feuerbach's influence, he had condemned as "abstractions,"
135 f.; Manifesto of the Communist Party (New York, 1948), Secs. IIIc and IV.
Cf. Franz Mehring,Karl Marx, trans. E. Fitzgerald (New York, 1935), pp. 154 f. On the
extent to which Marx and Engels' criticism of "true socialism" in the Manifestowas
"self-criticism,"on their relation to Moses Hess who had applied Feuerbach's idea of
alienation to economic relationships, and on their differences with August Willich, a
"true socialist"who led the Germanrevolutionaryforcesin 1848, brilliantlycommanded
Ohio troops in the AmericanCivil War, and edited the radical CincinnatiRepublikaner,
see The CommunistManife8towith Explanatory Notes by D. Ryazanoff, trans. E. and
C. Paul (London, 1930). pp. 213-23 and A. Cornu, "German Utopianism: 'True'
Socialism,"Scienceand Society12 (1948), pp. 93-103.
LOYD D. EASTON.
OHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY.
27 See Hegel, Philo8ophyof Right,Secs. 270, 124, 66. In the Rheini8cheZeitungof 1842
Marx followed Hegel's theory of the state to condemn censorship of the press as in-
compatible with "rational freedom." The individual only comes under the law in his
actions, Maix held, not in his thoughts and ideas, and a sound public mind cannot be
achieved by the evil means of reducing freedom. Many American thinkers in the 19th
century agreed with MoncureConway of Cincinnatithat Hegel's "apparent conserva-
tism was the crust outside a fiery radicalism"which viewed the history of the world as
the history of liberty emphasizingthe institutional conditions of freedom. See Conway,
David FriedrichStraU88(London,1874),pp. 23 f., and E. L-.Schaub,ed., WilliamTorrey.
Harri8 (Chicago,1936) pp. 72-75.
28 See Hegel, The Philo8ophyof Hi8tory,pp. 33, 37, 39,-200 fEf;'-Philoophyof Right,
pp. 166n, 365.