IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM: HEGEL AND MARX ON HISTORY, SOCIETY AND THE STATE

In this work I investigate the philosophical ties between Hegel and Marx in order to show how Marx's social, political and historical analyses carry out a methodological program that is consistent with and embraceable within Hegel's philosophical system. The standard interpretation finds Marx's historical materialism to be a radical transformation of "inversion" of Hegel's Absolute Idealism. Marx himself appeared to hold this view of the relation of his methodology to that of Hegel. So part of the thrust of my argument is that the materialism/idealism dichotomy by which he distinguishes his philosophical position from Hegel's is misleading, and indeed inaccurate, insofar as it tends to blur some crucial similarities in the overall works of these two thinkers. I attempt to explain why it is that Marx came to distinguish his position from Hegel's in terms of this dichotomy and how in his use of it he overstated the differences between himself and Hegel.;My overall strategy is to offer a reinterpretation of the relation between Hegel and Marx by showing that, in addition to the well known debt Marx owed to Hegel with respect to the use of "dialectics," the two thinkers ultimately have more in common philosophically than not. Thus, for example, I attempt to show that Hegel's "idealism" does not preclude the sorts of materialistic analyses of society and history given by Marx, and conversely that Marx's "materialism" does not require the abolition of philosophical principles of the sort which guide Hegel's attempt to give a systematic explanation of reality. I want to show that many of the divergent conclusions at which the thinkers arrived, e.g., with respect to the historical status and function of social and political institutions, are less a result of different philosophical presuppositions and more a matter of different empirical and normative assessments of the actual role of these institutions, especially in 19th Century Europe.