Introduction

Summary

The Introduction sets out the argument of the book, and distinguishes the approach taken from those of Louis Althusser and Daniel Brudney. It offers a preliminary assessment of the difference made by reading Marx’s project as that of the actualization of philosophy, and of the implications for understanding his relationship to his philosophical predecessors.

It has been thought that Marx’s intellectual project, culminating in the unfinished torso of Capital, is one that seeks to leave philosophy behind. It has also been thought, by contrast, that Marx sought to turn philosophy into something quite different from itself (a new and unprecedented ‘science’). It has been debated whether Marx is successful or unsuccessful in the moving away from, or beyond, philosophy that he allegedly attempts. Perhaps, it has been thought, despite Marx’s efforts to free himself from philosophy, vestiges of philosophy remain.

In this book I argue that Marx’s project must be understood in a different way. It is not that Marx sought to abandon philosophy, but that he sought to actualize philosophy. To actualize philosophy is not to leave it behind, or to turn it into something else, but to make it for the first time into what it is.

This book is an interpretation of Marx’s project of the actualization of philosophy. As such an interpretation, its task is to trace this project from his first announcement of it (in his early writings on ancient Greek philosophy) to his later work, and to show how he works progressively to make good on the injunction that philosophy shall be actualized. I argue that it is in Capital that we can finally see philosophy actualized along the lines he had been calling for from the first. That Marx’s great mature text does not contain philosophical doctrines, or argue from any set of philosophical principles, is a reflection of – rather than a challenge to – the status of the work as actualizing philosophy. For philosophy as the mere providing of doctrines or foundational principles is philosophy falling short of its actualization.

To say that it is Marx who actualizes philosophy is to say that he not only stands in a line of philosophers, with Aristotle, Kant and Hegel as his predecessors. It is to propose that we should read him as advancing beyond those predecessors as a philosopher: his work constitutes a philosophical advance on these illustrious precursors. That is a general claim about Marx’s relationship to previous philosophers. On a more specific front, the reading of Marx’s relationship to Hegel contained in what follows diverges sharply from what we tend to read about that relationship: Marx’s critique of Hegel, it will turn out, is far more radical than recent literature has accustomed us to think. Recent literature has both overplayed Hegel’s supposed anticipations of Marx and underplayed the depth of Marx’s critique of Hegel.

If it is right that Marx shows us what it is to actualize philosophy, then a further consequence is that his project is of importance to our own time. Philosophy, in its mainstream, today finds itself grappling with the question of its ‘application’ to the ‘real’ world. Marx shows us that, and how, this question about ‘application’ is misplaced: for philosophy, actualized, the question of application does not so much as arise, since philosophy, actualized (or better, in its actualization), does not stand apart from the world in the manner presupposed by talk of ‘application’. Elsewhere in contemporary philosophy, outside its mainstream, a revival of absolute idealism – echoing Hegel – is being pursued. Another way this book can be understood is as advocating, in our own time, the actualization of this absolute idealist philosophy. As I try to show in this book, it is a short road from Hegel’s conception of philosophy to philosophy’s actualization, even if the travelling of this short road effects a dramatic transformation in what philosophy looks like. Likewise for the absolute idealism of today and its actualization.

The actualization of philosophy will show itself to be the freeing of philosophy from constraints that it has imposed on itself, contrary to its own concept. For its own concept tells philosophy that it is not limited in terms of subject matter. Nor is it limited to a contemplative mode. To say that philosophy is not limited in terms of subject matter is to say that its subject matter suffers no delimitation, and so philosophy has no subject matter at all. As philosophy is actualized, then, the impression will – quite rightly and understandably – result that philosophy has evaporated, that philosophy is now nothing. But this was true of philosophy all along; its failure to let itself be thus nothing (or, to put it another way, everything) was a constraint it imposed on itself in contravention of its own concept. It follows that as philosophy is actualized, it will articulate itself into a host of exercises of enquiry, each of them susceptible of specific delineation in terms of its characteristic concerns, which will carry forward philosophy’s work. It will be the work of enquiry, and the specifically delineable topics of the enquiries, that will render philosophy other than nothing. Among these enquiries will be the critique of political economy, such as Marx practised in his own later work. There will be countless others. This is as it should be. For philosophy is human thinking in its totality: comprehension as such. ‘Comprehension’ is here to be thought of not as involving a limitation to merely contemplative absorption, but as encompassing the object of practical thought; indeed, comprehension of the object of practical thought will count as comprehension κατ’ ἐξοχήν.

A primary task for this book is to habituate us to a conceptual world that is foreign to us, but in which Marx was at home. Chief among the concepts to which we are to become reaccustomed are those of philosophy and actualization themselves. The effect of this exercise of conceptual relearning will be unsettling, given the world within which we are asking these questions: questions previously asked about Marx’s relationship to philosophy, and the answers given to them, will themselves start to look highly questionable. But it is not merely unsettling. It will also start to show that it is not that these questions are without meaning or urgency, but that their significance becomes apparent if we see them in the light of philosophy’s demand for its own actualization. It is by no means misplaced or silly to wonder whether Marx broke with philosophy, either by leaving it or by transforming it, for what Marx intends to do with philosophy does indeed involve a drastic change to received philosophy. The change, however, has the effect not of abandoning or transfiguring philosophy, but of bringing it into its own.

Rupture, Abandonment, Actualization

Lacking the idea of actualization, we are bound to read Marx’s project in terms of a rupture with philosophy or an abandonment of philosophy. This is in keeping with Marx’s tendency, from about 1845 onwards, to speak in pejorative terms of ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosophers’.

According to Louis Althusser, Marx effects an ‘epistemological rupture’.¹ Prior to the rupture, Marx is a philosopher: he subscribes to a Feuerbachian ‘humanism’. By means of the rupture, Marx brings into being a science that is entirely new and that could not have been foreseen from within any previously existing framework. (We might characterize this notion in terms of the putative new Marxian science resulting from a ‘paradigm shift’; to use this vocabulary would be apt, since Althusser’s notion of rupture shares with Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shift a common ancestry in the work of Alexandre Koyré and Gaston Bachelard.)

According to Daniel Brudney, Marx attempts to ‘leave philosophy’.² As in Althusser’s story, in Brudney’s story Marx begins as a philosopher. But he comes to reject what Brudney takes to be an essential feature of philosophy: its making of ‘normative’ claims. Marx therefore attempts to leave philosophy in order to found a value-free science, a science free of such claims. But, despite his best efforts, Marx does not manage to extricate himself entirely from the business of making normative claims. He must somehow convince us, for instance, that alienation is a bad thing. That conviction can only be secured by means of normative claims. And so Marx fails to leave philosophy.³

Both Althusser and Brudney, in their very different ways, remain innocent of the conception of philosophy that Marx is working with, and thereby fail to see how it can be that Marx regards himself as bringing philosophy into its own. Althusser and Brudney are each of them right to notice a profound shift in Marx’s thinking. But this shift is to be characterized not in terms of an attempted rupture (successful, Althusser thinks) or abandonment (unsuccessful, Brudney thinks), but in terms of the coming into effect of the actualization that Marx had from the first been calling for.⁴ This involves no transformation in Marx’s conception of philosophy, or of his commitment to philosophy. For his conception of philosophy had implied from the start that it require its own actualization. What gets left behind, in the wake of philosophy’s actualization, is a deficient incarnation of philosophy that does not live up to its name – and it is at this deficient philosophy that Marx’s vituperative remarks about ‘philosophers’ are directed.

By contrast with both Althusser and Brudney, Carol C. Gould argues that Marx was ‘a great systematic philosopher in the tradition of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel’. She adds that ‘Marx’s philosophical system is distinctive in that he develops it as a framework for his concrete social theory and his critique of political economy.’ Thereby, Gould continues, Marx’s work stands revealed as ‘a radical transformation of traditional philosophy’, a transformation ‘accomplished by means of Marx’s striking synthesis of systematic philosophy and social theory’.⁵ I agree with Gould that Marx transforms traditional philosophy – and that it is the philosophy of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel that he transforms.⁶ If I am right, however, the transformation is not to be understood as effected through a synthesis, as Gould has it, of philosophy with something else. It is the actualization of philosophy itself – Marx’s work in what is aptly called ‘social theory’ is not something added to this with which it is to be synthesized, but a constituent part of it.

It may seem strange to say that Marx first makes philosophy into what it is. We do not tend to think in such terms. There is what something is; it is that, or it is not. And so philosophy before Marx – that is, what went under the name ‘philosophy’ in the centuries before he wrote – either is or is not philosophy, or is better or worse philosophy. This way of thinking allows in the question: When did Marx (or anyone else) first, then, ‘actualize’ philosophy? The way Marx thinks about actualization, however, blocks this question. Actualization is not a process: it is not a kinesis, but an energeia. That is, it does not follow a trajectory and thereby come to completion; its activity is ever-present.⁷ Accordingly, it is not that once upon a time philosophy was non-actual, awaiting its actualization at some later time.⁸ This will be relevant, too, when we consider what Marx has to say about the human being. There is something that we are as human beings that, he thinks, we fall short of if we are ruled by capital. This is not a claim about a state that we might achieve in future, but about an ever-present truth.

Philosophy

It can be seen how it can be that Marx does not seek to break with philosophy – in either the way that Althusser proposes or the way that Brudney proposes – and that his transformation of philosophy is not a synthesis (as Gould proposes) but the actualization of philosophy, if we consider the conception of philosophy that Marx takes for granted. On this conception, philosophy has no subject matter, and is not a field of enquiry alongside or among others. It does not have a topic, in the way that, for instance, physics has a topic: nature. Philosophy, instead, is not some science among others, but science as such (‘the science’, or ‘science überhaupt’).⁹ Philosophy, being the total science,¹⁰ cannot be some part of reality, since a part of reality cannot comprehend the whole of reality. It must instead be, somehow, all of reality.¹¹ This is not, of course, equivalent to the (absurd) idea that a collection of philosophical doctrines or statements exhausts the contents of reality.

Marx’s proposal to actualize philosophy is, then, the proposal for philosophy to free itself from a constriction through which it fails to be what it is. One of Marx’s most often quoted statements, the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, reads as follows: ‘The philosophers have thus far merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’¹² The present book as a whole can be read as an exegesis of this statement. It might be thought, and the Thesis has often been read this way, that Marx here rejects philosophy, in favour of something else that will serve to change the world. Marx would seem to draw a contrast between what has been done in the past – by philosophers – and what is to happen henceforth. Since what the philosophers did fell foul of ‘the point’, one might presume that, according to Marx, some approach other than philosophy is now to be employed. But what Marx advocates is not the rejection of philosophy; it is the actualization of philosophy. In the light of philosophy actualized, mere interpretation of the world will show up as deficient. The deficiency lies not in philosophy, Marx thinks, but in philosophy as it has been practised thus far.¹³

To read the Eleventh Thesis in this way is to render intelligible Marx’s idea that, henceforth, philosophy shall be ‘praxis’. It has been widely recognized that praxis is of crucial importance, in some way to be specified, to Marx’s thought. It is striking, however, if one surveys the literature on Marx, just how much difficulty there has been arriving at a clear determination of what this means. It would seem highly desirable for Marx’s thought to be, somehow, intimately connected with, or orientated toward, praxis, since it is evident that he is invested in a project of radical social transformation. What understanding Marx’s project as the actualization of philosophy makes possible is a recognition that praxis is, for him, not a further add-on. Philosophy – that is, philosophy actualized – is practical; philosophy as contemplation is a privative, deficient falling away from this. It is not possible coherently to conceive of philosophy as theory, self-sufficient in itself, ‘standing over against’ the world. For there is no vantage point from which such a ‘sideways on’ conception of the relation between thought and reality could make sense. One way this can be described is as making good on Kant’s claims about the ‘primacy of the practical’.¹⁴ The ultimate vocation of thought is that it shall set itself to work (that it shall actualize itself, we may say) not in mere thought, but in the goal-directed action characteristic of intelligent, self-conscious beings – what we might call ‘thinking action’. This does not imply, of course, that philosophy (or thought) is never theoretical, but only that for it to be theoretical is for it to restrict itself.

Marx and Hegel

I will consider in detail in the body of this work Marx’s relationship to the tradition against the background of which his effort to actualize philosophy must be understood, and in particular the work of Aristotle and Hegel. Marx’s relations to this tradition are multifarious and deep-rooted.

Here I want to make some general remarks about the relationship between Hegel and Marx, and the light in which the present study casts this relationship. It is well-known that Marx was deeply indebted to Hegel. Marx, indeed, continued to speak appreciatively of Hegel long after this had become deeply unfashionable.¹⁵ The present work takes Marx’s debt to Hegel extremely seriously. It, however, casts the relationship in a different light from what has become customary, since it takes Marx’s critique of Hegel to be more fundamental and radical than is often thought.

Unfortunately Marx’s relationship to Hegel is often cast in simplistic terms, in terms of an ‘inversion’. Marx himself says that in Hegel the dialectic is ‘standing on its head’ (steht bei ihm auf dem Kopf).¹⁶ It is customary to go on to add the suggestion, on Marx’s behalf, that Hegel’s dialectic be ‘turned off its head, and placed on its feet’. The source of this commonly quoted addition, however, is not Marx, but Engels.¹⁷ That idea nicely fits the contrast between an idealism (‘on its head’) in Hegel and a materialism (‘on its feet’) in Marx. But it is a mistake to think that the contrast between Hegel and Marx can be captured in terms of a simple inversion. For one thing, as Althusser writes, ‘it is clear that to turn an object right round changes neither its nature nor its content by virtue merely of a rotation!’¹⁸ For another thing, Marx himself goes on to specify not that Hegel’s dialectic must be ‘turned the right way up’, but that it must be turned inside out (Man muß sie umstülpen), ‘in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’. The image here is of a more complex procedure, as befits the problem that Marx has set himself.¹⁹ It is not at all obvious by what operation an idealist dialectic might be transformed into materialist dialectic, or what the supposed materialist dialectic that results from the inversion could look like. Hegel inherits from Kant the idea that dialectic engenders contradictions in thought. What happens to the contradictions of idealist dialectic as they become contradictions of materialist dialectic? Should this be understood as the conversion of contradictions in thought to contradictions in reality? How, then, is the idea of contradictions in reality even to be understood? Issues such as these, which prompt in turn the question of what is to be understood by ‘contradiction’ in the first place, were raised with admirable straightforwardness and thoroughness by German and Italian scholars in the 1970s, but have since then found themselves buried under the vastly sophisticated edifice of subsequent literature.²⁰ It now takes considerable determination to recover the appropriate naïveté on which such questioning thrived.

I have said that this book takes Marx’s critique of Hegel to be more fundamental and radical than is often thought. This needs elaboration. When, in the 1970s, authors such as Michael Theunissen, Manfred Frank or Lucio Colletti approached Hegel with a view to grappling with the difficult question of dialectic, they to varying degrees had the question of Marx’s dialectic in mind.²¹ Today the situation is different. Hegel has, in the meantime, undergone an extensive rehabilitation. Excuses need no longer be made for Hegel. Hegel had previously seemed to be an absurdly extravagant metaphysician, but could now be regarded as merely rendering more rigorous Kant’s project of ‘deducing’ the categories that are the conditions of possibility of experience.²² This rehabilitation is now often combined with the idea that Hegel was a social critic of a powerful kind – an idea already promoted by Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse earlier in the twentieth century.²³ This means that it has now become standard to read Hegel’s defence of liberal monarchy coloured by medievalizing elements as if it offered – incredibly enough – a radical social theory anticipating Marx. Marx is thus left effectively no room to advance beyond Hegel. Part of the remit of this book is to help restore an earlier orthodoxy about Hegel. For all his radical impulses (especially in earlier work), it must be recognized that for Hegel philosophy is retrospective and self-sufficient in ways that Marx will contest. If we fail to recognize this, we will struggle to understand not only Marx’s critique, but also Hegel himself.²⁴ Too often, defenders of Hegel have slid from a justified resistance to readings of his political thought as jingoistically celebrating the Prussian state to a failure to acknowledge his explicit restriction of political philosophy to the retrospective exercise of recognizing the rational in the actual.

As I argue in this book, Marx takes himself not just to criticize Hegel on details. Marx holds Hegel’s overall philosophical approach to be flawed. His conception of dialectic does not live up to its own remit: it collapses under its own weight, and finds itself in a situation analogous to that of diairesis, or Platonic ‘division’. It follows from this that projects attempting to ‘map’ Hegel’s Logic onto Capital are mistaken. In Capital Marx presents us with a correction of Hegelian dialectic, not a version of it.

Marx and the Young Hegelians

In this work I take Marx’s critique of Hegel seriously. As a consequence, Marx emerges as, in some sense, a better Hegelian than any other of the Young Hegelians among whom he cut his intellectual teeth. For Marx grasps Hegel’s project at its roots as other Young Hegelians do not. Hegel aims at the unity of concept and actuality, but at the same time clings to a conception of philosophy as contemplative.²⁵ Marx’s project of the actualization of philosophy seizes this nerve in Hegel. By contrast, a Young Hegelian such as Bruno Bauer appears to depart fairly radically from Hegel. Bauer replaces the Hegelian ‘Absolute Idea’ (roughly speaking, God) with human self-consciousness. His series of critiques of the Bible therefore take on a startling aspect.²⁶ Where God had seemed to be the subject, now it is human beings. Bauer, however, imports the internal tension in Hegel’s commitments: the aspiration to the unity of concept and actuality, on the one hand, and a contemplative conception of philosophy, on the other. For Bauer, the work of philosophy remains mere theory, carried out independently of activity in the world.

The present study, in its defence of Marx’s project of the actualization of philosophy and his execution of it, works closely with Marx’s texts. It deliberately avoids a thematic approach widely adopted elsewhere. Such an approach encourages the idea that Marx offers us, for instance, a theory of ‘alienation’. But Marx does not present us with an array of theories, as if he were doing mere philosophy; he theorizes, but his theorizing is, from his introduction to radical socialism by Friedrich Engels in 1844 on, driven by his overall practical project. While driven principally by engagement with primary texts, the book also builds on the large body of scholarship on Marx and the Young Hegelians. Given the thesis that it defends, however, it makes use of this scholarship in a way that points in the opposite direction to that in which much of that work tends. It is right that Marx shaped his views through close engagement with Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Moses Hess, Friedrich Engels and others. And his articulation of the actualization of philosophy can only be understood if the manner in which he works through what he takes from these thinkers is understood. But the literature has the general effect of reducing Marx’s stature by inflating his debts to other thinkers. This study, by contrast, seeks to bring out Marx’s superior originality and importance compared with each of these others, and to reveal him as a thinker of even greater range and power than he has often been acknowledged to be.²⁷

A related feature of much literature on Marx is a tendency to understand him as passing through a series of stages. There is a Bauerian stage, followed by a Feuerbachian stage, and so on. I avoid reading Marx in this way. It is highly implausible, for one thing, that Marx was ever a convinced ‘Bauerian’, or even a convinced ‘Feuerbachian’ (although he did, for a time, overtly present himself as the latter). For another thing, Marx saw the instability in these positions; and this explains why he never held firmly onto any of them. Instead, I read Marx as progressing through an ever-shifting landscape, ‘settling accounts’ (to use his own phrase) with a vast array of influences as he goes. It is, accordingly, far more important to analyse the ways in which Marx, in a text such as the Paris Manuscripts, both adopts Feuerbachian ideas and already signals tensions with those ideas resulting from their inadequacies, than it is to try to pin down just what position he held at any one time. Marx’s thinking was constantly caught up in movement; there are no such fixed positions to be isolated and identified as we trace the development of his thought.

Marx’s Theory of History

Throughout its treatment of Marx’s actualization of philosophy, this book will abstract away from Marx’s theory of history. This may seem not merely peculiar, but even perverse, since it will emerge that for Marx the work of philosophy, as it is actualized, is historical through and through. As a result, this book itself will appear deeply un-Marxist, and will even seem to perpetuate the project of self-sufficient philosophy that it aims to represent Marx as condemning. The character of the present study is, however, programmatic. It is a creature of an inevitably absurd type: a prolegomenon to a reading of Marx. If the claims presented here are to be accepted, then philosophers ought to follow Marx and carry out detailed historical investigations of the kind he himself pursued, to the exclusion of the promulgation of philosophical doctrines characteristic of traditional philosophy. But such work is not carried out in this book.

There is another reason, however, for leaving Marx’s claims about history outside the scope of the present study. Marx believed that a study of history bears out that the economic-social formation distinctive of each historical epoch contained the seeds of the next. He also believed that in each historical epoch the remains of the preceding epoch were detectable. (Hence his comment that the anatomy of the human is a key to the anatomy of the ape.²⁸) These claims are too large to be evaluated here; they merit a separate study. The viability of the overall project of Capital does, however, crucially hinge on them. For Marx’s purposes, it had better be true that the envisioned proletarian seizure of the means of production built up by the capitalists will give birth to communist society – that is, a society that builds on capitalism rather than falls back behind it into tyranny. If Marx’s claims about history cannot be maintained, there will need to be some other reason than that which Marx provides for thinking this credible. To settle such matters would involve extraordinarily detailed and meticulous historical investigation of the kind that Marx helped, more than anyone, to promote. It is important to mention these matters here, even though they cannot be treated in the present work, since it is one of the – for philosophers, sobering – lessons of the actualization of philosophy that the scrutiny of historical claims is something that philosophy, despite what it has traditionally told itself, cannot excuse itself from.

Note that the large reservation entered here about Marx’s theory does not amount to a nervousness about a supposed historical determinism, whatever the object of such nervousness is meant to be. Instead, it is a reservation about a substantive claim Marx makes about the manner in which one social formation gives rise to the next. If that claim is, quite generally, true of the past, it will be true of the future; the question of whether it is true of the past is a substantive historical question. Mere philosophers are not in a position to solve it.

The Actualization of Philosophy in the Here and Now

Philosophy today continually faces the question of its own ‘application’. How can philosophy make itself, or show itself to be, ‘applicable’ to the ‘real world’? To ask this question is already to have gone wrong. If philosophy is thought of the illimitable object, there is nothing for it to be other than thought as such. Philosophy is, then, our thought, the thinking of the worldly agents that we are. One might want to insist that philosophy is a delimited activity, among other thought-involving activities. But this is a mistake. There is no principled distinction to be made between thinking activities, other than in terms of their objects. And these objects cannot be anything other than specifications of the one, illimitable object of thought as such. The failure that underlies the question of philosophy’s ‘application’ is that of remaining stuck in a contemplative conception of philosophy, according to which philosophy stands over against the world, attempting to vindicate its credentials for (what is then thought of as) entry into the world. The aim should, instead, be to give the very obvious fact that we are already in the world its due.²⁹

Much of what goes under the name of philosophy today is splintered into a seemingly unmanageable array of special enquiries. This splintering results from an abrogation of the thought that philosophy – or, equivalently, thought – is a unity. In contrast to these trends, Sebastian Rödl has articulated a defence of what he calls ‘absolute idealism’.³⁰ Rödl’s absolute idealism, like the doctrine that Hegel propounds under that name, produces an irresolvable dualism. This is the dualism between a universal subject, on one side, and human individuals, on the other. Rödl’s absolute idealism sets up the thinker as divine. This book can be read as an offer to read Rödl’s absolute idealism in light of the way in which it falls short of the actualization that philosophy demands of itself.

Anyone who takes seriously the idea of the actualization of philosophy will inevitably want to know what such actualization shall now look like. It is in our world that philosophy is to be actualized. And that is a world in which we live our lives through the perversion of capital in ways that Marx’s work brings home. The proper and serious question must be faced whether it really can be carried out, and in a way that does not bring with it the horrors committed under the banner of official Marxism in the twentieth century. My reading of the mature Marx, if it is correct, generates both a promise and a warning. Since this reading involves Marx’s actualization of philosophy generating specific claims, capable of truth or falsity, it promises to specify the path to be followed to communism. For the same reason, Marx’s claims run the risk of being wrong. Marx’s claims are not automatically correct – not even if one retreats to some supposed sufficiently general level. This is a lesson that needs to be relearned today by those who declare themselves in favour of Marx.

Outline of the Argument

In Chapter 1, I begin from Marx’s calls for the ‘actualization of philosophy’ in his earliest writings (his Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy and his Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature). I show that Marx at this stage already recognizes the problematic nature of two opposing approaches to the ‘immediate realization’ of philosophy that he finds in his environment – that of the ‘liberal party’ and that of ‘positive philosophy’. The liberal party seeks to change the world by means of critique, but finds itself impotent to effect change; positive philosophers affect a stance of mere recording of the world as it is, but find that their attempt at mere receptivity turns over into critique. What underlies these two tendencies, and their dialectical turning over into each other (critique turns over into passivity; passivity turns over into critique), is a picture of the relation of thought to reality that must be overcome. Overcoming this picture points the way to what the genuine actualization of philosophy will look like, by which the oscillation between the attempts at immediate realization will be stilled.

In Chapters 2 and 3, I turn to Marx’s unpublished Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. This is an important text that has been understudied.³¹ In Chapter 2, I outline the argument that Marx mounts against Hegel in his attempts to clarify his divergence from him by means of the examination of a stretch of a specific text – a series of paragraphs in Philosophy of Right dealing with the state. Here it is important that Marx’s critique of Hegel thinks along with Hegel insofar as Marx endorses the aspiration to arrive at an organic theory of the state. In Chapter 3, I examine Marx’s complaint that Hegel’s procedures in the Philosophy of Right are philosophically defective. Marx underwrites, again, Hegel’s aspiration to deliver the ‘logic of the state’. But, he claims, Hegel fails. Hegel has set out to provide a self-generating logic that, at the same time, is the logic of empirical reality. But, among other problems, for such a self-generating logic to show itself to be the logic of empirical reality involves it, in contravention of its own supposed methodology, in reaching out over itself into empirical reality in order to secure the specific logical ‘transitions’ in play. So, in effect, Hegel’s self-generating logic replicates the defects of Plato’s ‘method of division’ (diairesis) pointed out by Aristotle.

Thus far, Marx has been showing how it is that Hegel’s philosophy fails to be its own actualization. This philosophy sets itself the task of being the unity of concept and actuality, but remains trapped in the concept.³² In Chapter 4, I examine Marx’s so-called Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (the ‘Paris Manuscripts’). This is, again, an unpublished text. The text represents a complex theoretical situation. On the one hand, Marx here takes himself to be guided by what he regards as Feuerbach’s ‘theoretical revolution’, through which Hegel’s philosophy is converted from an idealism into an anthropologism. According to Feuerbach’s supposed, self-proclaimed revolutionizing of Hegel’s philosophy, ‘the human’ takes the place of the Idea, and the subject–object relation is conceived of as the human–nature relation. At the same time there is an insistence that human beings are not just one universal subject but are distinct, embodied individuals. Marx takes on this unstable set of thoughts with a strenuous enthusiasm. He combines what he takes on from Feuerbach, however, with a newfound occupation with radical socialism and communism. This imports into the picture he takes over from Feuerbach a historical dimension inspired by his reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology that challenges the ahistoricism in Feuerbach.

In Chapter 5, I examine a series of texts in which Marx works to wrest himself free from the structure common to absolute idealism and Feuerbach’s ‘absolute anthropologism’ (to borrow Louis Althusser’s phrase). Throughout these texts (The Holy Family, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy) Marx, in part in collaboration with Engels, works to challenge the supposed ‘self-sufficiency’ of philosophy. In The German Ideology this challenge starts to transcend the framework that idealism and anthropologism share, by working out what has become known as ‘historical materialism’. Marx thereby joins together what Feuerbach had found himself forced to hold apart: history and materialism.

Through historical materialism, Marx has managed to recover the Hegelian dialectic (extruded by Feuerbach in his inversion of idealism into anthropologism) and imbue it with its genuinely historical character, as Hegel had not been able to. Marx now, then, puts himself in a position to make good on the actualization of philosophy. Through the development of historical materialism, Marx will start to work out how to deliver the ‘specific logic of the specific object’ he had already advocated in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. There is an irony in this development, in that it is only in Capital, a work dealing with a constricted subject matter that seems to have little to do with philosophy as traditionally conceived, that Marx manages to open out philosophy. The work, to be sure, restricts itself to the topic of capitalism. The restriction in topic is not, however, a restriction of philosophy itself. As philosophy actualizes itself, it is to make good on its claim to articulate itself into special sciences, pursuing highly distinct topics. Furthermore, it may well be that if Marx had not been held back by ill health and by the exigencies of participation in the communist movement, he would have carried his work in other branches of science further than he did.

In Chapters 6 and 7 I examine a strand of argument extracted from Capital Volume 1. This pair of chapters echoes the structure of the earlier pair, Chapters 2 and 3. I begin, in Chapter 6, by exhibiting the strand of argument, in part to exemplify Marx’s manner of arguing. It is important, here, to see that Marx really does mount an argument that he has traditionally been understood as making, although more recent interpretations have suggested that such traditional readings are excessively naïve. This argument concerns the actual working of the capitalist system. It is not merely a critique of bourgeois economic categories, although it is also that. In Chapter 7 I show that what Marx is doing, when he argues in the way I have outlined in Chapter 6, is, by his lights, genuine dialectic – to be contrasted with Hegel’s failed attempt at dialectic. The dialectic is driven by ‘real contradictions’; at the same time, it at every turn respects the Principle of Non-Contradiction. As is true of this strand of philosophy in its actualization and of any other, practice drives theory. What drives the theory is the overthrow of capitalism – the genuine historical movement on which, Marx thinks, the proletariat is embarked.

In the final chapter, I consider the relevance of Marx’s project of the actualization of philosophy for our own time. Philosophy, in our time, would seem to need to justify itself by demonstrating how it can be applied to reality (the so-called real world). To engage in such justification is to have failed to grasp what philosophy is. Philosophy is not some discipline among others, defined by its restricted subject matter. It has no such subject matter. Neither is it a mere canon of reasoning, for philosophy itself understands. The power of philosophy is precisely that, when it does not suffer the constriction of setting itself apart from the world, it is our thinking without limit.