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The Social & Political Thought of Karl Marx By Shlomo Avineri.
(Cambridge
: Cambridge University Press, 1968)
. Pp
. viii, 269.
$5 .50 cloth, $2
.45 paper.
Philosophy & Myth in Karl Marx By Robert C. Tucker. (Cam-
bridge : Cambridge University Press, 1961) . Pp. 263. $5 .50
cloth, $1
.95 paper.
Theory and Practice
: History
of a Concept f rom Aristotle to Marx.
By Nicolas Lobkowicz . (Notre Dame : Notre Dame University
Press, 1967) . Pp. xvi, 442
. $8 .95.
N
on-ideological analyses of Marx
'
s thought, of which the volumes
under review constitute a sample ; are free from the distorting
pressures of immediate political objectives
. This condition for ra-
tional discussion does not however mean there will be agreement
either as to the genesis or significance of Marx 's views. Any study
of the prehistory of his speculations presupposes an explicit or im-
plicit identification of what is central and what is peripheral, just as
any discussion of the body of Marx
'
s work must deal with its his-
torical antecedents . Marx is concerned with the perennial questions:
the relationship between man and man, between man and nature,
and between man and God . He also dealt with historically con-
tingent philosophical and social problems
; he inherited as well as
chose the Hegelian, or rather the Young Hegelian intellectual edifice,
the sentiments of romantic revolution, and the concerns of political
economy. Moreover, he left all three in a different state than he
found them
. Theoretical analyses of Marx '
s writings must be con-
cerned with both Marx s answer (or, in some instances, his non-
answer) to the perennial questions and with Marx
'
s place in the
stream of European intellectual history . Even if, in some measure,
such a treatment remains a desideratum, the modal interpretations
from which a comprehensive study could be fashioned have been
established : on the one hand it is argued that Marx is a com-
monsensical or even a philosophical analyst of individual and social
existence within the historical horizon provided by European and
North American industrialization
. On the other, it is said that he
is a primitive religious enthusiast, an activist mystic who proselytized
a dogma of human self-salvation
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Speaking very broadly, Avineri argues more for the first alterna-
tive while Tucker and Lobkowicz prefer the second.
I
Avineri begins his discussion with a consideration of the im-
portance of Hegel-in particular, of Hegel's
Philosophy of
Right,
because
it is from Hegel
s political philosophy that Marx works
toward the roots of the Hegelian system-and not the other way
round
.
What Marx objects to in Hegel
s political teaching is not
its intentions ( to bridge the gap between the rational and the
actual ), but rather its main institutional consequences,
which
invested empirical reality with a philosophic halo that it did not
deserve
. Hegel
'
s Idea,
which should have been a criterion for judg-
ing reality, turns out to be a mere rationalization ; it leads to a
quietistic acceptance of the socio-political situation as it is, and
elevates a contemporary phase of history arbitrarily into a philo-
sophic criterion
1
As early as March, 1843, Marx had mastered a
technique, originally invented by Feuerbach and known as the
transformative method, whereby the seemingly objectionable em-
pirical implications of Hegel's political views could be tackled with-
out destroying the entire system .' The result of Marx
's
Feuerbachian
transformation is the Critique
of Hegel
'
s Philosophy of
Right,
a care-
ful reading of which, as Avineri shows,
can demonstrate that the
distinctive patterns in Marx
's later thought had already taken shape
when he attacked Hegel in this work
Hegel
s error, according to Marx, was that he confused subject
and predicate
: sovereignty, the essence of the state, was conceived
as a subject while the real subject, the
concrete man,
was con-
ceived as a predicate of the state
. Marx does not deny this to be an
accurate observation of early nineteenth century German politics,
1 Avineri, pp
. 13, 9, 14
. Hegel has not lacked defenders against Marx
'
s charge
that he provided a rationalization of the status quo
. See, for example, the
articles by Knox, Pelczynski, and Avineri himself, in W
. Kaufmann, ed
. , Hegel
's
Political Philosophy (New
York,
1970) or the essays by Pelczynski, Shklar,
Ilting, and Berki in Z . A Pelczynski,
ed
.
Hegel's Political Philosophy : Problems
and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1971).
Z
Compare Marx s letter to Ruge, 20 March 1842 with his letter also to Ruge,
of 13 March 1843 . Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke
(Berlin, 1963), vol.
XXVII, pp. 401,417.
sAvineri, p
. 13
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the basis upon which the strata of civil society rests and move . '
That is, they are the very condition for the existence of civil society.
Avineri comments
The circle is thus complete
: since Hegel
s theory
ignores the human subject, it must ultimately reach an institution-
alization from which a whole stratum of human subjects will be
exluded 7 Even within civil society, classes which are politically
represented are not represented as subjects but as predicates of that
in virtue of which any social appearance at all is possible, namely
property . Furthermore, it is precisely entailed property, which Hegel
saw as providing an economic base sufficiently insulated from the
market forces of civil society to enable the nobility to devote them-
selves to the public bureaucracy, that Marx finds the most arbi-
trary of all
: the absoluteness of an entailed estate makes it a kind
of absolute subject and its aristocratic bureaucrat is a kind of
absolute predicate .' The state per se is
therefore both an epihe-
nomenon of real social forces and a means whereby real social forces
are hidden from sight.
The discovery of real classes in real conflict, with no dialectical
ascent (Aufhebung) to the universality of the state implies that civil
society and the activity carried on in civil society rather than the
political realm and political activity are the center of concern
. The
activity, of course, is economic, but Avineri is careful to point out
that the role of economics in Marx '
s scheme is perhaps more subtle
than it is often made out to be
: Marx does not postulate the aboli-
tion of class antagonisms because any economic mechanism points
in that direction . No economic analysis precedes his dictum about
the abolition of classes ; they will be abolished
(aufgehoben)
be-
cause historical development has brought the tension between the
general and the particular to a point of no return
The point of
no return has been achieved by capitalism, but capitalism, the es-
sence of which is infinite accumulation, was made possible only
through the emergence of civil society as an autonomous sphere of
economic activity devoid of political or religious restraints
. The
°Werke,
I, p
. 284
. Later in the
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher
Marx iden-
tified the proletariat as a class of civil society which is not a class of civil
society Early Writings, Tr. T . Bottomore (London, 1963),
p
58.
7 Avineri, p
26.
°Hegel, Philosophy of Right,
para
305-307 ; Marx, Werke
I, pp
. 303-05;
Avineri, pp
. 27-31.
°Avineri, p
.
59
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189
ecumenical expansion of capitalism which, as Marx puts it in the
Communist Manifesto,
batters down all Chinese walls,
has created
a new world of economic interdependence
1 0
Moreover, the geo-
graphic universality is complemented by a universality of depend-
ence : not, to be sure, the dependence of this individual man upon
this particular master but of all men upon all other men
. The
dynamics of the capitalist mode of production and the intricacies of
the division of labor have created, Marx said, a universal inter-
dependence of mankind
. Pointing to an inconspicuous passage in
Capital III,
Avineri shows how Marx, as early as 1864, described
certain structural modifications of entrepreneurial capitalism, later
called the
Managerial Revolution,
that resulted from the process
of production but which were both unintended and unforseen by
capitalists themselves or by other economists
.
1 2
Similarly, Marx
noted the change in British rule of its overseas empire in India from
the relatively straightforward economic exploitation, responsible to
Parliament, carried on by the East India Company to the almost
total anonymity of the later bureaucratic rule of India House 1 3
The above account of a few themes in Marx
s work which Avineri
treats seem to corroborate the view that Marx was first of all an
empirical social scientist or even a commonsense critic of Hegel.
For, was not what Marx said about capitalist production true? Had
it not established for the first time a worldwide economic structure?
Did not governments pursue policies, both foreign and domestic,
designed to increase productivity? Are we today not all too familiar
with huge private bureaucracies that are capitalist only through
linguistic indulgence? And likewise we know public bureaucracies
that suffer so little public scrutiny as to make them indistinguishable
from private corporations
. Or again, when Marx called Hegel
s
'°Selected W orks (New Y o r k ,
1968), p
. 39.
1
'As a matter of fact, Hegel made precisely the same point but draws quite
different conclusions in a text unknown to Marx, the so-called Jenaer Real-
philosophie
See Avineri'
s discussion in
Labor, Alienation, and Social Classes
in Hegel
s Realphilosophie, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol I No
. 1 (Fall,
1971), pp. 103 if.
1 2
Avineri, pp . 177-79
; the passages cited are from Capital, III, Ed
. F. Engels,
(New York, 1967), pp . 437-441 . See also the remarks of Ralf Dahrendorf,
Class & Class Conflict in Industrial Society
(Stanford, 1959), pp
. 41-48.
1 3
See The Government of India,
New York Daily Tribune, 20 July 1853, in
Avineri, ed
Karl Marx on Colonization and Modernization (New York, 1968),
pp. 110-115
Werke,
IX, pp. 181-87
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notion of
Mande
obsolete and argued that his bureaucracy was just
another particularistic group within civil society, is there not more
than a grain of truth in his assertion? Assuredly, much of what Marx
said was and may be still applicable to the real situation of actual
workers, actual bureaucrats, actual capitalists and so on
. But Marx
also implied that in Avineri
's words, a
point of no return
had been
reached, that the Hegelian project of reconciling particularity with
universality had broken down, but also that Hegel
'
s basic notion was
a sound one . What we would like to know, whatever the validity of
Marx'
s observations on economic, political and bureaucratic realities,
is what Marx thought of the significance of the facts he observed,
why he conceived them to constitute a point of no return, and what
lay ahead In short, is what Marx
meant
also applicable to
reality, or has he constructed a speculative reality of his own de-
vising, a
second reality
as it has been called
1 4
Avineri
'
s caution in
this regard is understandable
. If Marx not only told men what was
going on under our very eyes,
1
5
as he put it, but also provided
these facts with their real significance, that is one thing . One may
anticipate no extraordinary problems in textual explication
. But, if
Marx is constructing a speculative system which provides a meaning
to the phenomena he describes on the basis of his own imagination,
and if he employs a philosophical or economic language in such a
way as to disguise, as well as he can, his own non-recognition of
the meaning of the historical and social existence of man, then a
formidable task of decoding arises
. Avineri appears to fall between
these two fundamentally antithetical positions.
A closer scrutiny of one of Marx '
s more potently evocative sym-
bols may expose the difficulty . Marx argued that Hegel
's state was
an inverted reality
; the prescriptive trick therefore is obvious:
reality must be inverted once more by the transformative method:
man must be made again into a subject .
Y 8 In Marx'
s view, true
society
which, like Hegel
'
s, reconciled the particular with the uni-
versal, could be achieved not through integration by the state of the
1 4
E Voegelin,
Anamnesis
: Zur Theorie der Geschichte and Politik
(Munich,
1966), pp . 302-313 ; P
. Berger, The Problem of Multiple Realities : Alfred
Schutz and Robert Musil,
in M
. Natanson, ed
. Phenomenology and Social
Reality
:
Essays
in Memory
of
Alfred Schutz
(The Hague, 1970).
The quote is from the Communist Manifesto, Selected
Works,
pp. 46-47.
1 6
Avineri, p. 32
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191
particularity of civil society, but by the universalization of man who
abolishes both the property which makes of him a predicate and
the state which pretends to achieve universality
. For Marx, when the
distinction between the particular and the universal is overcome,
man will have actualized his true self,
which is identical with his
social self
. A society of true selves is a true society or, as
Marx sometimes terms it,
true democracy
.
Such a society is the
actualization of man's communist essence or socialized man .
1r
What one may reasonably expect from a political scientist giving
an exegesis of an argument such as the one Marx has made is a
concern with the meaning of the original Hegelian symbols such as
subject,
elf,
or reality which clearly do not have any com-
monly accepted conceptual significance
. What must
reality
be
if man can invert it? How can man be in a position to perform
this task? How can man be made again
? Is a
elf
still a human
being? And if not, who is this new Adam and who is his creator?
Moreover, we would expect a closer scrutiny of Hegel
'
s notions of
particular and universal,
and how they rely for their significance
upon a view of history whose validity Avineri leaves unstated and
unexamined
. Instead of a philosophical analysis of the symbols used,
Avineri accepts them at face value and passes on to an elemental
analysis of
true democracy
as if it were a perfectly ordinary term,
even though he shows that it has nothing to do with classical or
modern forms of government suggested by the word
. He then points
out that it occupies a place in Marx '
s speculation akin to the place
which Christianity occupies in Feuerbach
'
s . Here again, instead of
a critical exploration of Feuerbach
'
s tricks, he gives a straightforward
comparison : just as the appearance of Christianity implied its even-
tual disappearance as the need for religion was abolished and trans-
cended
(au
f gehoben) ,
so [true] democracy as conceived by Marx
poses the question whether it is not at the same time the apex and
the transcendence Aufhebung)
of the political constitution, i
.e . of
the state
. Not only the state disappears : civil society as a dif-
ferentiated sphere of interest disappears as well i 8 The resulting
true society
is one in which the contradiction between public and
private is ended . There is no inquiry either into what this
Au f hebung
17
W erke,
I, pp
. 283, 231
; Avineri, pp
. 31-34.
18Avineri, pp . 35-36
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des Staats
might likely mean as a pragmatic eventuality, nor is there
any theoretical analysis of the symbolism, its derivation, or its real
significance . This is surprising in the light of Avineri
'
s acute sug-
gestion that the generalization of the Greek polis under conditions
of modern society is more likely to achieve Hobbes
' Leviathan than
Pericles'
Athens
.
Avineri does provide us with an account of Marx
'
s appropriation
of Hegel's notion of universal class . As late as October, 1842, Marx
still wrote of
`
the poor
in a quite ordinary manner
;
20
it was only
after his reflections on Hegel
s political views that the significance of
the proletariat as the real universal class emerged
. The necessary
attributes of true universality are apparent from our earlier discus-
sion
: the class must be without political visibility and thus without
property
; it must have no particular interest but express, in the very
conditions of its existence, a human universality
; it must be totally
alienated from civil society
2
' When the condition of the proletariat
becomes coextensive with mankind there will be no more property,
no more particularism, no more civil society, and consequently no
more alienation
.
2 2
In the following chapter Avineri explains Marx
'
s teaching con-
cerning the relationship between man and nature, the anthropology
which sustains Marx
's dramatic vision
. He also answers a question
posed earlier, how Marx conceives of
reality
such that man can
invert
it. Marx
s epistemological materialism,
he says occupies
a middle position between classical materialism and classical ideal-
ism . . it synthesizes the two traditions, it transcends the classic
dichotomy between subject and object
723
Avineri amplifies this
opaque description by noting that Marx derived his view that
reality is not mere objective datum, external to man, but is shaped
by him through consciousness from Hegel's
Phenomenology, so
that epistemology
ceases to be a merely reflective theory of cog-
nition, and becomes the vehicle for shaping and moulding reality
And finally
To Marx reality is always human reality not in the
1 9 Avineri,
Labor, Alienation and Social Classes,
p . 110.
L O See his article in the
Rheinische Zeitung,
27
October 1842,
Werke,
I, p.
119 ; Avineri, p
57.
2 1
Marx, Early W ritings, pp
58-59,
132 133
2 2
Avineri, pp
59-60.
2 3
Avineri, p
. 69, cf Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action
: Contemporary
Philosophies
of Human Activity (Philadelphia, 1971), pp . 43-45
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193
sense that man exists within nature, but in the sense that man shapes
nature
. This act also shapes man and his relations to other human
beings.
2 4
It may be possible to give an intelligible interpreta-
tation of Marx
s epistemology from what Schelling has called
meontological metaphysics, but this is doubtful
prima facie because
Marx confines his argument to what has been called man
s
natural
and historical
situations 2 6 Moreover, if we look carefully at
Marx
's own explanation of the meaning of his words, we find the
difference between
nature
and
history
eroded and we are left
in a confusion of contradiction
2 8
This confusion is present in Avi-
neri 's commentary as well.
On the one hand, it would seem that
reality
is the same as
nature
understood in a commonsense way as indicating external
things, rocks, trees and perhaps animals, in which case it makes a
kind of sense to say that man
shapes and moulds reality But in
order to labor upon nature, to
shape
it, man must also be
within
nature in the sense that he shares some of the characteristics of na-
ture-corporeity, for example . If men were without bodies there
would be no problem
; but if we are human rather than angelic, the
very condition for
shaping nature is that we exist within it . At
the same time, however, if we were simply shapers of nature we
would be unaware of ourselves as shapers If nevertheless, we are
aware of ourselves, even if it is simply an
artistic
awareness,
2 7
then human reality is not exhaustively described by saying that man
shapes
nature
. On the other hand, it would appear that
reality
means something quite different from
nature as can be seen in an
analysis of Avineri's account of the relationship between conscious-
ness and reality
Even with Hegel who attributed rather extra-
ordinary powers to consciousness or, more exactly, to the self-con-
sciousness of the wise man, the link to reflective
. . cognition was
never broken
2 8
With Marx, and also with Avineri
s explication,
there is a profound ambiguity
. No one would wish to dispute the
2 4
Avineri, pp
. 68, 71.
2 5
See Emil Fackenheim,
Metaphysics and Historicity
(Milwaukee, 1961), for
a concise elaboration of the problems involved.
2 8
See, for example, Marx
s play with the connotations of nature
in his
Early Writings, pp. 164-166, 206-207.
2 7
Avineri, pp . 73, 282.
2 8
Most emphatically in the famous passage of the Preface to the
Philosophy
of Right, pp . 12-13
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contention that external reality may be given significance through
the ability of consciousness to project
; indeed, what we mean by
instrumentally rational action is simply the ability to organize activity
in such a way as to achive a desired goal
. But if consciousness were
simply instrumental rationality, we would be unable to decide which
goals are better than others . Moreover, we would be unable to raise,
let alone understand, the question of the meaning of our projects.
At the very least, consciousness implies an ability to stand outside
of the endless chain of practical projects
; it is only by
standing
outside
that we can raise questions of goodness and meaning
. More-
over, if we ask questions concerning the whole project including
the instrumental consciousness that shapes each individual project,
then whatever . experience of reality follows, it cannot be simply an-
other project of consciousness but, on the contrary, it must be ex-
perienced as an
objective datum, external to man
The reason
is apparent enough
: if we knew that
reality
was simply a conse
-
quence of conscious activity, if, that is, we knew that the meaning
of the whole of our project could be derived from consciousness as
well as experienced in consciousness we would also know that it was
not the whole but quite obviously a part.
Rational consciousness, in the emphatic sense of apprehending
reality as meaning which is not created by instrumentally rational
consciousness, implies among other things the reality of limits to
human projects
. Contrarily, if there is no rational experience of the
externality of meaning, there is no intrinsic reason why there should
be any experience of the limitations of human projects, since all
apparent limits are simply the projects of conscious activity which
therefore can be transcended by further activity
. But the structure
of reality is not altered simply because it is unrecognized
. Rather,
such non-recognition exerts a kind of pressure on the argument
which is either to be resisted by dogmatic ukase or ignored by flights
of fancy prepared by
non-sequiturs,
unanalyzed terminology and so
on
In particular, the absence of a notion of limit, which re-
flectively expresses the reality that existence is not the whole of being,
is analyzed by Avineri in a passage from the 1844 manuscript where
Marx explains the genesis and transcendence of natural needs
.
2 9
Early Writings,
pp
. 206-07 ; A vineri, pp
. 79-81
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195
Needs are not simply natural in
the sense of biological require-
ments, they are also
social and historical
and therefore determined,
in the end, by man himself 3 Granted that there are certain bio-
logical aprioris, what is focal in Avineri '
s analysis is the
conscious-
ness that will see the need for these particular objects as
a human
need This consciousness is not apriori but rather is historically con-
tingent
. In a way this can only be true trivially
: Cicero could not
possibly consider an automobile to be a
human need But this
triviality hides a more fundamental ambiguity, masked in Avineri
s
presentation, which may be brought to light by the following ques-
tions : is there a distinction, in reality, between needs and wants or
desires? And if so, is this distinction better to be understood in terms
of changing objects of desire (e
.g
. chariots versus automobiles) or
changing conceptions of need (e
.g
. the automobile as a necessity)?
Or rather, is it not a more sound procedure to consign a need to
the realm of biology and examine desires, which presuppose the
satisfaction of needs, in terms of their inherent goodness and ra-
tionality? The example of Marx, cited by Avineri, of a small house
that seemed adequate until a palace was built nearby whence it was
seen as a mere
hut, shows that our desires and pleasures spring
from society
and thus are measured
by society and not by the
objects which serve for their satisfaction
.
3 1
Avineri's gloss main-
tains Marx s original equivocation :
Since historical development
enriched human wants, they cannot be measured without being re-
lated to the modes of production which created them
The point of
Marx and evidently of Avineri as well is not a prelude to an analysis
of base desires and wants, nor of the irrationality and uncertainty
of the measure provided by society, 3 2 and certainly not of the sig-
nificance of the tenth commandment
. Rather, Avineri concludes that
since wants or human needs are not naturalistic facts,
. they
can be consciously mastered and directed
We are blessed with an
implicit guarantee that if
human society can generate
a certain
level of needs, one needs only adequate social organization to satisfy
them
. If society had not reached that level of potential satisfaction,
3 Cf. The German Ideology,
E d
. S
Ryezanska, (Moscow, 1964), pp . 39 if.
3 1
The quote is from
Wage Labour and Capital, Selected Works, pp
84-85;
Avineri, p . 80.
See Avineri
's comments on Lindsay and Galbraith, p
. 81 fn
.1
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THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
the level of felt needs would not reach as high
.
3 3
On the basis of
this guarantee
all wants in principle can be satisfied because they
are all mediated through consciousness and therefore are human
The nihilistic implications of Marx
s teaching are overlooked by
Avineri and he passes on to a consideration of the necessary pre-
suppositions
: if there are no limits established independent of our
desires that can be apprehended by reason, if all wants are to be
measured by society, and yet if also and at the same time there is
a real meaning to be found in conscious activity, it necessarily fol-
lows that man both creates the world and himself .
3 4
What is as-
tonishing in all this is that while Avineri writes about Marx with a
straight face, as it were, he is also aware of the reason for Marx ' s
irrational refusal to recognize reality
:
Man as creator of himself
and of his world also provides a criterion for the analysis of the con-
ditions of his contemporary historical existence
. Had Marx lacked
such a criterion, he could not have liberated himself from a relativist
positivism which
. would of course have created an unbridgeable
gulf between history and philosophy, between the proletariat and the
revolution as the realization of man
'
s potentialities as homofaber
.
36
That is, if man were not creator of himself and his world, if there
were an
objective datum external to man
that situated and there-
fore limited man
qua
man, then indeed history would cease to be
the story of the coming of the proletarian revolution, the final
Au
f hebung
and the perfection of man
'
s self-creation.
Avineri is not always so uncritical . In both the Introduction and
the Epilogue he devotes a few excellent comments to what others
have seen as the centerpiece of Marx
's speculation,
turning the pos-
sibility of human redemption into an historical phenomenon about
to be realized here and now
. Moreover, Avineri indicates the
Hegelian origins of Marx
s
eschatology of the present.
3 7
What he
does not do, but what nevertheless ought to be done, is explain the
theoretical illegitimacy of applying symbols which pertain to a class
of experiences devoted to man's relationship to God to the realm of
mundane affairs . Indeed, properly speaking the transformation is not
3 S Avineri, p . 80.
34
Avineri, pp . 84-85
; cf Marx,
Early Writings,
p . 207.
3 6
Avineri, p
. 86.
3 6
Avineri, p . 250.
3 7 Avineri, pp
. 4, 250
.
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Tucker says, is understandable and even reasonable, but it is
erroneous
4 2
Moreover, Tucker disagrees with the presuppositions
that governed the
basic question in the mind of an older generation
of students and critics of Marx
'
s system
-namely,
is it true?
Such
a question implied that the
chief problem was one of verifica-
tion, and presupposed that Marx
'
s first concern was to provide an
account of empirical events
4 3
But this is the wrong question and it
is based on presuppositions which, Tucker says, are misleading:
Marxism
. did not arise out of an empirical study of economic
processes in modern society .
Although he documented [his con-
ception of capitalism] with materials from real economic history,
and thus made it
appear economically real to many people, it was
not, even in his own time, descriptive of an actual capitalist eco-
nomic system The view that Marx is now
obsolete,
which pre-
supposes the problem of verification, is also dismissed the assump-
tion that Marx '
s doctrine represented a successful effort to explain
the social-economic phenomena of his
time, that it was broadly
descriptive of the actual social world in which Marx lived
is super-
ficial
and erroneous
Marx,
Tucker concludes,
was
not a
social scientist
.
4 4
In developing his interpretation of Marx, Tucker
provides us with a justification of these claims . But whatever its
completeness appears to be, Tucker
's hermeneutical circle may be as
restricted as Avineri
'
s
; the answers he gives are reflected not just
in the questions he asks, but also in the presuppositions he accepts
and which may effectively obscure problems which Avineri con-
fronts.
Tucker begins with a question
: instead of Marx the philosophical
critic or empirical social scientist whose views are subject to verifi-
cation or disproof,
may [his work] not be comprehended basically
as an ethical or religious system? None too scrupulous about
connotative distinction, Tucker concludes that indeed
Marx is un-
questionably a moralist At the same time, he draws a very fine
distinction between a moralist
and a moral philosopher based
upon two criteria
: first, Marx does not follow the correct
form of
inquiry which proceeds from the Socratic tradition
and consists
4 2
Tucker, p
. 125.
Tucker, p
. 12.
44
Quotes from Tucker, pp
. 218, 234, 227.
4 5
Tucker, p
. 14
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in
a methodical doubt, a suspension of commitment
as to what
constitutes the supreme good for man . Marx 's work violates this
criterion because
: It does not start by raising the question of the
supreme good for man or the criterion of right conduct
; these ques-
tions are not raised by Marx as
questions
. ' In addition to this pro-
cedural exclusion of Marx from the company of moral philos-
ophers,
Tucker excludes him because it is impossible to ascribe one
or another familiar ethical positions to him
. Marx is not an utili-
tarian because he criticized Bentham, nor is he a socialist because he
is not concerned with distributive justice . Nor again can Marx be
called a
moral futurist
as Popper argued .
47
The argument is then
refined
: Marx was a moralist of the religious kind The
eligious
essence
of Marxism is obscured by Marx s atheism, but, upon closer
examination, it turns out that Marx did have a notion of a
supreme
being after all, man
. Moreover, from a structural viewpoint
we can observe similarities between Marxism and
the Christian
religious system
. Specifically, both
provide an integrated, all-in-
clusive view of reality,
both view all existence under the aspect of
history,
both contain a scheme of redemption, and
. both conjoin
theory and practice
.
The most important aspect, however, the
master-theme of the system, which
corresponds to the master-
theme of salvation of the soul in the Christian theology of history, is
the idea of
a radical `change of self which produces a wholly
new man
48
There is a certain robust vigor to Tucker s argument that can-
not help but impress us
. At a time when the articulate are devious
and those who hold to their views are consumed by their passion, it
is refreshing to encounter a strong argument . An admiration for
Tucker
s frankness, however, cannot preclude us from drawing at-
tention to certain deficiencies in his presentation . We have already
noted his indiscriminate identification of ethics with moralism with
religion
. His rhetoric seems to say
: why not look at Marx as a
moralist or a religious thinker?
But then this conceptual liberality
contracts to a pinched stipulative precision as he distinguishes be-
tween moralist and moral philosopher
only
to broaden again as he
compares Marxism to
the Christian religious system
Tucker
' s
Tucker, pp. 15-16.
47
Tucker, pp. 16-20.
48
A11 quotes are from Tucker, pp . 22-25
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199
presentation, to say the least, lacks technical sophistication . First of
all, the notion of a
Christian religious system ignores fundamental
theological differences among Christian groups
; moreover, it is ques-
tionable whether the term
system
has any meaning in a Christian
context
. He also fails to discuss what is meant by a structural view-
point
from which Marxism and Christianity appear as similar
systems It may be countered that such general objections to
Tucker
s argument simply reflect an aesthetic judgment upon his
rhetoric
. Surely, one might say, it is possible to recast his argument
in a more theoretically adequate vocabulary
. The criticism offered
here is not simply of his rhetoric however, but also of the concepts
expressed in it
; one objects to Tucker 's vocabulary precisely because
it is, upon close inspection, quite difficult to know what he means by
his use of words
. For example, does his persistent use of the adjective
medieval
in connection with Christianity imply any particular
theologian or philosopher, or any specific time period? Does it imply
perhaps that
modern
Christianity or Christianity without any
periodizing adjective is not, from a
structural viewpoint,
com-
parable to Marxism? One simply does not know.
Let us examine the argument which justifies the title of his book
so as to determine as clearly as possible the core of Tucker's thesis.
Hegel s philosophy,
he says, provides the background to Marx
'
s
work : Truly, Marxism may be seen as Hegelianism inverted.
Speaking very broadly, the relation between them may be described
as follows
: Hegel represents the universe as a subjective process;
Marx, turning the system around, ends up by representing a sub-
jective process as the universe-the social cosmos
Marx really had
gone beyond philosophy
but was it, as he claimed, to reality?
Now it is quite true that he had an arresting vision of something
real
. . But the reality that Marx apprehended and portrayed was
inner reality
The forces of which he was aware were subjective
forces, forces of the alienated human self, conceived, however, and
also perceived, as forces abroad in society
. Since the decisive char-
acteristic of mythic thought is
that something by nature interior
is apprehended as exterior, that a drama of the inner life of man is
experienced and depicted as taking place in the outer world, there-
fore, Marx
had gone beyond philosophy into that out of which
philosophy, ages ago, originated-myth
.
4 s
It would be a relatively
4 9 A11 quotations are from Tucker, pp
. 218-219
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simple matter to call into question the adequacy of Tucker's under-
standing of the
decisive characteristic of mythic thought
5 0
but
such an exercise would hardly be worth the effort, for it turns out
that Tucker is not really interested in the phenomenology of mythic
reality so much as the metaphorical or connotative aspects of the
word . Thus, for example, he writes that
Marx
's W eltanschauung
has become a political mythology, a narrative associated with the
rites of single-party politics
s'
No doubt Marx can be conceived
as a
myth
maker, his system can be conceived as religious, and
Soviet party politics can be conceived as a
rite
It is plain, how-
ever, that in order to conceive the phenomena the way Tucker would
have us, we must appreciate his rhetoric and ignore his lack of con-
ceptual control
. Apart from the wholly vague counsel to accept a
structural viewpoint,
Tucker never tells us
w hy Marx ought be
conceived as a
religious moralist
In part, Tucker
s defective concepts appear only in light of the
more adequate theorizing about the relationship between secular
change and religious enthusiasm that has appeared since the pub-
lication of his book . We now possess an extensive and precise
vocabulary to analyze the phenomena involved
. Research on mille-
narian movements in the non-industrial world provides an indis-
pensable background for the re-examination of European and North
American social movements
6 2
Studies on the experiences and sym-
bolism of gnosticism, magic and alchemy as well as historical ac-
counts of the transmission of symbols,
6 3
studies on specific problems
Tucker mentions H. Frankfort et al ., Before Philosophy and
E
. Cassirer,
Language and Myth, though not directly in connection with his definition of
mythic thought (Tucker, p . 224 fn
.)
. A recent exposition of the complexities of
myth which, incidentally, takes issue with Tucker's authorities is G
S
. Kirk,
Myth
: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and
Other Cultures
(Berkeley,
1971), pp. 101f, 263-268.
5 1
Tucker, p . 233.
5 2
Bibliographies can be found in any of the following representative works:
V
. Lanternari,
The
Religious of the Oppressed : A Study
of
Modern Messianic
Cults ,
Tr., L. Sergio (New Y ork , 1963) ; P. Worsley, The
Trumpet Shall Sound:
A Study
of
Cargo Cults in Melanesia,
2nd ed
. (New York, 1968)
; Sylvia L.
Thrupp, (ed .), Millennial Dreams and Action: Studies in Revolutionary R e-
ligious Movements
(New Y ork, 1970)
; W . E . Miihlmann et al. Chiliasmus and
Nativismus
(Berlin, 1961)
;
Archives des sociologies des religions, No
. 4 and 5,
(1957-58).
5s
In
this context one must mention the work of Hans Jonas,
The Gnostic
Religion,
2nd ed, (Boston, 1963) ; Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible
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RECENT STUDIES ON MARX
201
of modern politics in general and Marx
'
s speculation in the context
of modernity have provided the elements of a proper interpretation
of Marx as a religious thinker b
But, to return to our text, it turns
out that Tucker is not really interested in religion or even myth
but in psychology.
We quoted Tucker above to the effect that the reality involved
in Marx's arresting vision was an inner reality . More precisely,
it was the experience of an alienated human self
The origin of
Marx
'
s concept is still Hegel
'
s civil society
. Marx
sought the
`
anatomy
' of civil society in political economy, but the anatomy of
political economy, in turn, was given in the idea of ` political-
economic alienation . The consequence was the notion of
the
alienated species-man or the species of alienated men,
who ful-
filled the assigned roles in Marx
'
s dramatic conflict . That is, con-
flicting forces of the alienated self were thus conceived as external
social forces
.
Tucker objects to Marx projecting individual spirit
-
ual disorder onto society in general because, while all men are born
into society,
Man is not born alienated, although he is born with
a potentiality of becoming an alienated individual
. No matter how
many individual men may belong to this category, it is always an
individual matter .
es
Alienation may befall a man but it is not an
independent category of existence which somehow he inherits at
birth. Indeed, Tucker explains, alienation is an ancient psychiatric
term meaning loss of personal identity or the feeling of personal
identity 7
so that the individual is an accomplice of society in the
creation of the alienated self.
Again, the language Tucker employs is not, technically speaking,
(New
York, 1971) [French ed . 1956]
; A
. Koyre,
Mystiques, spirituals, alchem-
ists
du XVI
e
siecle allemand
(Paris, 1955)
; C .G
. Jung,
Collected Works,
vol, XII (Princeton, 1968)
; N
. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Milleinium, 2nd ed.
(New York,
1961).
Here we need mention the work of Karl Lowith,
Meaning in History
(Chicago, 1949) and
From Hegel to Nietzsche
(New York, 1969) [German
ed. 1941]
; Eric Voegelin, The New Science
of
Politics (Chicago 1952),
Science,
Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago, 1968) [German ed
. 1959] and
The Forma-
tion of the Marxian Revolutionary Idea, Review of Politics, 12 (1950), 275-
302
; J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism
(New York, 1960) ; Gerhart Nie-
meyer, Between Nothingness
and Paradise (Baton Rouge, 1971).
Tucker, pp
. 219-220.
Tucker, p. 240.
Tucker, p
. 144
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the
best, but there is an important truth in what he says
. Everybody
has reason to be dissatisfied, from time to time, with his situation.
It is not quite so reasonable to impute the cause of dissatisfaction to
the world rather than to the individual
; nor, even if the world is
wrong,
or perhaps imperfect, does it necessarily follow that men
can do anything to make it
right
Tucker shows quite well the
psychological dynamics of alienation as they appear in Marx
s specu-
lation and points out that what Marx thought was the descriptive
analysis of a social fact was in truth a sophisticated description of
Marx
'
s own neurosis
. 6 8 Even so, we still must discover what Marx
considered to be the true reality in virtue of which existing affairs
could be conceived as the consequence of alienation.
It is somewhat tedious to spell things out, but Tucker never
places the constituitive elements in their properly intimate relation-
ship
. Class conflict is a reflection of the self-alienation of mankind
in so far as the world and the self created by labor-power are used
to maintain unnatural and inhuman institutions such as religion, the
state and so on
. The insight that the self and the world is created
by labor-power is the result of the Feuerbachian transformation of
Hegel 's notion which provided
Geist with the same task
. And how
was Geist
and its activities understood by Marx? As the apotheosis
of man
. Whether the joyful news that man had become divine was
expressed in the cryptic form of Hegel
s code, openly in Feuerbach
s
transformation of the code, or cryptically again in Marx's assimila-
tion of Feuerbach
'
s
humanism,
the experiential core which pro-
vides the trial from Hegel to Marx with its unity is retained
: man's
self-realization as a godlike being or, alternatively, as God
.
6 9
Marx
s spiritual problems now appear in a different light
: if he
learned from Hegel that man had become divine, and if he then
learned from Feuerbach that the divinity man achieved was imagi-
nary, it was his own contribution to discover that within this
imaginary self-divination a true divination was proceeding apace.
If we return to reality for a moment, the significance of Marx's
position, no less than that of Hegel is clear
: neither could abide the
condition of being human, neither could accept himself as creature.
Tucker, pp
. 1441f.
6 9
Tucker, p
. 31
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Marx
'
s alienation is self-alienation indeed
.
6
It is the alienation of
a man possessed by an infinite desire to become God but whose de-
sire is constantly thwarted by reality
. Marx hailed Prometheus as his
patron but neglected to notice that Aeschylus considered Prometheus
stricken with no small madness.
III
Our main criticism of Tucker has been to point out a theoretical
sloppiness which can lead to a host of misleading conclusions even
when the general thrust of his argument is correct . His discussion
of Kant, for example, plays with the ambiguities of
reason
as a
commonsense term and as a highly specific technical term in Kant
'
s
philosophy
6 1
His identification of pride with something like original
sin is confusing, and his declaration that Hegelianism is simply an
apologia for pride ignores the dialectical subtlety of Hegel's posi-
tion which combines a monumental self-confidence with an equally
monumental humility
.
6 2 No similar comments can be made of the
third work under review . Lobkowicz is a master of classical, me-
dieval, and modern philosophy
. His tone is measured, his argument
precise . Unlike both Avineri and Tucker the title is excessively
modest so far as Marx is concerned
:
Theory and Practice provides
a lucid exposition of several of the major themes in Marx
'
s work be-
yond the notion of
the unity of theory and practice
Lobkowicz
' s
large book is the first part of an even larger account of the develop-
ment of the concept of practice in Soviet philosophy. Moreover, his
method is less the defence of a thesis than the recounting of a his-
tory, keeping as close as possible to the empirical materials . Oc-
casional explicitly critical passages serve to expose lacunae in an
argument, sophisms, inarticulate premises and so on . Such a presen-
6 6
The argument of this paragraph is in approximately the reverse order of
Tucker
'
s argument . That is, he concludes with a consideration of myth in
Part IV, gives the substance of his psychological translation of Marx
s myth
in Part III and provides us with the clinical, philosophical details of the
psychology of aggrandizement in Parts II and I.
6 1
Tucker, p . 38.
Tucker, pp
. 32, 67
. See Hegel'
s statement concerning the share of the
particular individual
in the advent of self-conscious spirit
Phanomenologie
des Geistes, e d . J . Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1952), pp
. 58-59
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tation no less than the sheer bulk and richness of narrative make a
complete analysis impossible
. We can only summarize Lobkowicz
'
s
major additions to our understanding of the genesis of Marx
'
s
notion.
The first section contains a collection of materials for a pre-
history to Marx
'
s treatment of theory and practice . It begins with
an account of the classical distinction between philosophical and
political dimensions of existence
. Neoplatonic degradation of political
praxis into a cathartic preparation for a non-
theoretical
and
strictly contemplative mystical ecstasy, subsequent alterations to
contemplation provided by Christian demands for charity, and the
post-theoretical practice of Duns Scotus provide the necessary
background for the characteristically modern view exemplified by
Bacon and Descartes
. For politics, the important factor was the
denial of the reality of tradition and practical knowledge : ethical
and political decisions, because they depended upon contingencies,
can never be taken on the basis of knowledge . This view is quite
different from Aristotle who argued that practical, that is, political
and ethical knowledge had a smaller degree of certainty because its
object was changing and contingent
: By reducing all knowledge
to one
kind Descartes commits himself to a radical irrationalism in
those areas, most significantly ethics and politics, where mathematical
knowledge is irrelevant . 6 3 Such a conclusion, despite the efforts
Spinoza, Malebranch, Leibniz, and even Locke to extend mathe-
matics to the ethical and political realm, greatly disturbed Kant
who was committed both to a genuine ethics and to Cartesian
natural philosophy.
Kant'
s well known solution was to divide reality in two
: non-
metaphysical appearance is mathematical and the non-appearing,
non-theoretical is metaphysical
. Knowledge having to do with the
natural world was theoretical
; knowledge having to do with the
truly real suprasensible world was
practical .
The one is studied
in terms of natural scientific concepts, the other is 'apprehended
through freedom
. Freedom places man in a world additional to the
world of nature, but, because he is first of all in the world of nature,
moral, that is,
practical
laws appear as
oughts Theoretical,
scientific laws deal with what is
An ought, an ideal, is by
definition remote from actual conduct, which is precisely Kant's
B 3
Lobkowicz, p . 119.
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205
point : the laws of the intelligible world are not implemented, but
willed
. Hence Kant'
s famous aphorism that the only unqualified
good is a good will is based not upon the ontological status of the
good, but upon the status of will
. But the ontological law of the will
is freedom which makes a good will simply obedience to the very
nature of will . The vast inflation of the commonsense observation
that a person has some choice about the life he leads implies that
all except strictly physical laws are imposed upon man by him-
self,
since man is free in everything but physical laws to define
his own place in the world.
Hegel 's contribution, in this context, appears as a rather simple
one
: he treats will as a special mode of thought, in particular, as a
desire to have reality conform to reason . As history unfolds, the
importance of will and activity declines as reality achieves greater
and greater reasonableness
. Pragmatically, there is a good deal of
ambiguity in Hegel
s formula
: after all, all men may not describe
reality in terms of its reasonableness. Lobkowicz argues that, for
Hegel, the reasonableness of the present is simply not problematic;
it is a fact of history that must be recognized 6 5
. The notion, so
prominent in the preface to the
Philosophy of Right, that
the
future holds nothing new
is also found, as Kojeve has argued, in
the Phdnomenologie 8 8 When a thinker is of the opinion that history
has come to an end certain rather obvious psychological problems
arise that are less acute if the end of history is seen as a future
occasion . In particular, historical facts whose meaning is obvious to
everybody must be
reinterpreted so as to have them conform to
the imaginary millennial present . Hegel's method of achiving this
task, Lobkowicz argues, is to glorify the present by arguing that in
reality man is participating in God
s eternal life, to secularize Chris-
tian eschatalogical symbols, and to develop a science
which
comprehends the now secularized symbolisms in terms of the trans-
figured empirical events of actual history
.
6 7
6 4 Lobkowicz, p
. 135.
6 6 In
the
Phfinomenologie Hegel issues a kind of spiritual death warrant on
those
representatives
of the public who resist recognizing the reasonableness
of reality
Philnomenologie, p
. 58.
6 6
A
Kojeve,
Introduction
a
la Lecture de Hegel,
2nd ed
. (Paris, 1947), pp.
280 ff, 442 . Lobkowicz gives a brief account of the pre-history of the symbolism
o f
nothing new,
pp
. 166-73.
6 7
Lobkowicz, pp
. 174-181
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What remained as the unshakeable experiential ground for the
speculations of Hegel's followers after the master'
s death in 1831
was the knowledge, vouchsafed to them in Hegel 's own words, that
man was in possession of absolute, all-embracing certainty . True
enough, the empirical world did not conform to absolute knowledge,
but that meant only that the activity which would transform reality
would literally save the world . The traditional political virtue, pru-
dence, had no place
. How could it? If one knows, past experience
is of no account, for
facts could be no real challenge to those who
knew ; they could always be reinterpreted or changed
.
6 8
The first
salvo was fired in 1833 with the publication of Friedrich Richter
' s
treatise on the Last Things which, inter alia, questioned the ade-
quacy of Christian eschatology from the perspective of absolute
knowledge afforded by Hegelianism
. Richter also pointed out that
the bliss provided by Hegelianism was purely speculative and had
nothing to do with the real world of men
. Nevertheless, he insisted
that if the transfiguration of reality was meaningful to the intellect
of philosophers, there was no reason in principle why it could not
be meaningful to the rest of mankind as well
. ° °
Once the secret was out, a whole new set of problems arose,
particularly for men who were dissatisfied with reality, who con-
sidered it irrational
.
The theological debate, which wound its
tortuous way through Strauss
proofs that the Gospel was myth
and Feuerbach
s
proofs
that man was God, are simply continua-
tions of what Richter began
. New vistas, however, were opened by
two men : Bruno Bauer and August von Cieszkowski
. Indeed,
Cieszkowski's small tract, the
Prolegomena Zur Historiosophie, is
considered the crucial link between the theological problems of
the early Hegelians and the political radicalism of thinkers such as
Hess and Marx. 70 Hegel
'
s error, Cieszkowski said, was to believe
that wisdom was only retrospective and absolute knowledge confined
to the past
.' Cieszkowski countered that if Hegel could bring Kant
' s
three absolutes of God, freedom and immortality within the purview
8 8
Lobkowicz, p
. 185.
8 9
Lobkowicz
's study of Richter is based upon J. Gebhardt, Politik and
Eschatologie : Studien zur Geschichte der Hegelschen Schule in den Jahren
1830-1840
(Munich, 1963), pp
71 if.
7 0
Lobkowicz, p. 202
; cf. Avineri, pp
. 124 ff.
7 1
The alternative formulation, favored by Kojcve, is that history had ended.
Either way the implications are the same. Cf
. Kojcve, pp
. 194, 284 f, 288f
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2 7
of his
science,
why not time as well? He answered by the con-
struction of a view of universal history by means of a then current
trichotomy of historical progression. There were, he said, three ways
to know the future : by imagination, as with pre-Hegelian seers
and prophets,
by thought, as with Hegel, and by action which was
the direction,
of the future
The action involved was post-theoreti-
cal, it was the praxis of an absolute knower Man was now an
accomplice of the Absolute ; he could fulfill the aims of Providence
simply by acting according to reason, according to his
ow n
reason . 7 7 2 Where Hegel transformed Kant s absolute moral will into
absolute thought, Cieszkowski succeeded in transforming absolute
thought back into absolute will, only unlike Kant, he placed it not
beyond
theory but rather had it absorb theory on the way by
. This
was important for one reason
: if Rosenkranz was genuine in his
fear that the generation of philosophers which followed Hegel were
destined to be merely
gravediggers and monument builders,
7 3
it
was Cieszkowski
s great contribution to relieve the nervous anxiety
which the spectre of such occupations provoked in the young men
whose
libido dominandi was equal to that of the master
. For a man
such as Bruno Bauer however, even Cieszkowski would not do
. True,
Cieszkowski differed with Hegel
'
s view that the absolute knower
akin to Minerva
's Owl, but in his opinion that reality developed
alongside knowledge, Cieszkowski
s
post-theoretical practice
was
not critical
.
After having read Marx s sarcastic comments in the German
Ideology and
The Holy Family,
it is difficult to take Bauer s criti-
cism very seriously
. And yet, Bauer was simply a consistent He-
gelian ; the only difference between him and Hegel was that for
Hegel the world was rational and hence to be justified while for
Bauer it was not and hence to be criticized . Bauer is comical only
because the world he critically annihilated remained untouched.
But exactly the same was true of Hegel
'
s justified world
. Two
roads and two roads only were possible as the consequences of
critical destruction
became apparent
: either one could take the
road of Marx where criticism issued in political activity, or one
could remain faithful to criticism, secure in the knowledge that
7 2
Lobkowicz, p. 198.
Karl Rosenkranz,
Hegels Leben
(Berlin, 1844), p . xix
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THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
criticism alone was the way to truth
. But even Marx did not take
his final path immediately
; in the Critique of Hegel
'
s Philosophy of
Right
Marx is more realistic than Bauer only because he advocates
propaganda rather than an esoteric development of the truth, but
the premise, that the proper path lay in
criticism was not chal-
lenged 4 4
Even so, Marx was the first to suggest an answer for a
problem that had bothered him even in his dissertation
: if absolute
knowledge is not actualized, then it can hardly be absolute and if
criticism is necessary, then this fact is evidence that the critic
'
s knowl-
edge is less than absolute
7 5
Marx
'
s answer is that real or practi-
cal salvation may be attained in the deeds of an extraphilosophical
humanity, or a part of it,
which meets the theory half-way 7
If, as
Marx argued, salvation would come when humanity or its repre-
sentative accepted
criticism as its principle of action, then it
surely was possible to argue that such representatives had been des-
tined for their salvific role by history in much the same way that
history destined Hegel to achieve absolute knowledge.
In fact, it is upon the basis of Marx '
s knowledge that the
proletariat is the representative of mankind that his elaborate
speculation on alienation retains a degree of intelligibility
. We begin
with the knowledge
that the self-suppression of the proletariat as
a separate class establishes a socialist society, a society in which each
man acts as the representative of mankind
. In this sense, socialist
society is simply a
goal,
a Kantian ought But Marx also says
that proletarian self-suppression will be an Aufhebung of alienation,
a negation of a negation One can
'
t have it both ways ; if indeed
human history is the laborious self-actualization of man
'
s species-
being, then Aufhebung
must follow Aufhebung
to its dialectical in-
finity,
in
which case socialist society must appear as an arbitrary
and premature totalization
. On the other hand, the Kantian
ought
is non-dialectical
. The juxtaposition of dialectical and non-
dialectical elements is resolved to Marx
s satisfaction because he can
conceive of the self-development of mankind as dialectical while the
knowledge
of the telos of this process ensures that any merely
logical inconsistencies can be dismissed as
abstract Thus what
appears to be the premature totalization of an open dialectic is,
7 4 For example, Early W ritings,
p . 52.
See Lobkowicz, pp
239-247.
7 6
Lobkowicz, p 276
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2 9
in reality, Marx says, the radical disjunction between
pre-history
and
history
. For socialist society, the past, and therefore all prior
societies and the self-actualization that went on in them, in funda-
mentally external
. No wonder that when Marx spoke of
socialist
man he demanded everyone else keep silent .
Marx
'
s knowledge
is also the inspiration for his furious po-
lemics against the other Left Hegelians, in particular against Bauer
and Stirner
. Against the first, his argument turns upon the relative
importance of economics and politics
; against the second, the truth
of Hegel's dialectical understanding of history and, as Lobkowicz
argues, it is important to keep both fronts distinct
. Thanks to En-
gels' Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy which Marx read
early in 1844,
Marx discovered that the proletariat
'
s role in the
history of human emancipation might be described as due to the
socioeconomic nature of mankind's self-development- a discovery
which obviously suggested that the philosopher
'
s role was far less
central than either he or his Left Hegelian colleagues had believed
.
7 8
It also suggested a new role for the critic and a new subject for his
critique : through a critique of the reflection of reality in the disci-
pline of political economy, Marx could seek to demonstrate that
the very principles of political economy imply the Auf
hebung of
the world order they reflect. Once this truth, hidden in the abstrac -
tions of bourgeois political economy, is exposed to the proletariat,
it will become conscious of its necessary task . It is from this per-
spective that Marx met Bauer's objection to mass action
. He agreed
that all previous revolutions were failures, but added that this was
because the men who carried them out were not truly representative
of mankind . Thus, the premise of Bauer's critique was false, and his
former friend was critically annihilated by showing that Left Hegel-
ianism generally was simply a reflection of an already condemned
world-order.
On the other front, Marx had to defend his position against the
7 7
Cf Early Writings,
pp
165-166. Lobkowicz
pp
. 359-372.
7 8
Lobkowicz, p 375.
7 9
Lobkowicz (p
. 382) indicates that in a second volume he intends to show
that, when faced with the obvious fact that the bourgeoisie too could become
conscious of Marx's
laws
and so
amend
them (p
. 376), that is, that the
real problem, pauperization of the proletariat, could be contained, if not exactly
solved
by the incorporation of the trade unions into industrial society, new
explanations of the respite given to the bourgeoisie had to be concocted
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THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
attack upon the entire Hegelian enterprise launched by
Stirner
s
odd book, The Ego and Its Own .
S
If we look upon the Hegelian
succession as a story of every-increasing profanation, from Hegel's
original reduction of the world-transcendent God to a world-im-
manent Geist, to the reduction of Christ by Strauss from the axis of
world history to a mythical symbol of the species divinity of man-
kind, to Feuerbach's transformation of God likewise into the divine
species and finally to the reduction of the divine humanity by Hess
and Marx to society, then
Stirner seems to have taken the next
logical step, and to have reduced everything from God, through
Mankind to Society, to the bare individual that each of us is .
81
For Stirner, everything from Hegel
s
Geist to Marx
's communism
was simply an ideal to be consumed by the insatiable individual
which alone retained reality
. Such an objection had to be met . Stir-
ner had gone too far in his eclipse of reality, for if everything were
simply a
divertissement
for an aggressive self, there was no point in
laboring to achieve socialism
. Prior to the
German Ideology, which
Lobkowicz suggests was aimed primarily at Stirner,
S Z
Marx had
never thought it necessary to argue why socialism was desirable;
the problem was always posed in terms of showing how socialism
was the
correct
consequence of Hegelianism
. Stirner
'
s attack on
Hegelianism in all its forms meant that the only reply that Marx
could make was to argue that the role of the proletariat was not
an ideal, and that his condemnation of the present world order
was simply a reflection of the laws of history, while everybody else's
was a reflection of the existing world-order . The answer to the
first problem was his notion of
historical materialism ; the answer
to the second was his notion of
ideology
8 O
Lobkowicz, p
. 391.
8 1
Lobkowicz,
Karl Marx and Max Stirner,
in F . J . Adelmann, S. J., ed.
Demythologizing Marxism, Boston College Studies in Philosophy, Vol. II
(Chestnut Hill and the Hague, 1969), p . 75.
8 2 His argument is inherently plausible
: Marx and Engels both had more
interesting things on their minds than a return to what Engels called
this
theoretical twaddle
After the publication of The Holy Family, there would
seem to be no reason critically to destroy
Bauer and Company all over again.
But the publication of Stirner
s book after The Holy Family
demanded, if not
a public reply, then at least a private refutation, as indeed Marx called
The
German Ideology
some years later, Preface to
The Critique
of
Political
Economy,
in Selected W orks,
p 184 .
Lobkowicz,
Theory and Practice, pp.
403 ff
; cf . E
. Voegelin,
The Eclipse of Reality
in Natanson, ed ., op
. cit.,
pp
188-89
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211
This was surely an ingenious answer to Stirner, but it contains
a fundamental ambiguity. Marx claimed, early in the text of the
German Ideology, that the premises from which he began were not
dogmatic but real
Consequently,
these premises can be verified
in a purely empirical way
8 3
If Marx is, as he claimed, simply
describing reality, then what he is describing as history
is,
ab initio,
revolutionary
. There is no need for ideals because reality is
already revolutionary
; but this is surely as unsatisfactory as Hegel
'
s
claim that reality was
rational
On the other hand, if there is a
truly revolutionary practice which is not simply what happens
anyhow, there must also be an ideal
in precisely the sense that
Stirner criticized
. Lobkowicz summarizes this
hopeless
ambiguity:
if ideas formed in the human mind are `materially prescribed,
nothing but the expression of objective necessities, then there is no
need to urge people to be ` practical, ' to act
. On the other hand, if
there really is a
`
point
'
in purposefully revolutionizing the existing
world, if it matters whether people
`practically attack the change
given things
'
-that is, freely decide to do it rather than do it under
the pressure of existing circumstances-then undoubtedly there must
exist ideals which are more than only a reflection of circumstances
themselves
S 4
Again, one cannot have it both ways : communism
cannot both be necessary and be the object of deliberation and
action . Either Stirner is right, and Marx is a strict determinist or
Stirner is wrong, and Marx 's attempt to translate his ideal of com-
munism into a historical necessity is self-contradictory.
Lobkowicz
s narrative concludes with this brief discussion of the
genesis of historical materialism, and we must await a more
thorough analysis of the concept in a subsequent volume
8 6 As it
stands, Theory and Practice is
clearly a major contribution to Marx
8
German Ideology,
p
. 31.
84
Lobkowicz, p . 422. This objection to the dilemma of revolutionary praxis
is not, it should be noted, a criticism of Marx
s theory
about
practice . Indeed,
there is a good deal of truth in Marx
s observation that because of the con-
tingencies of one
s situation, history, in the sense of
what men do, depends
upon the conscious, rational intentions of men, but this same contingency can
subvert their intentions and provide men with consequences quite antithetical to
what they sought
. Thus, for example, there is nothing but an obvious empirical
truth in the observation that circumstances make men just as much as men
make circumstances The
German Ideology, p
. 51
. Cf
. Lobkowicz, pp . 415,
417, 426.
8 5
Lobkowicz, pp
. 408-409, 426
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THE
POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
research, and one hesitates indeed to offer even a mild disclaimer to
an intellectual edifice of such imposing significance
. Nevertheless, a
few critical observations are demanded . A relatively minor point is
the question of what it takes to be a Left or Young Hegelian . At
one point, only Bauer is, properly speaking,
a Left Hegelian and
yet,
between 1839 and 1843 they all [i .e ., Bauer, Hess and Ruge]
were occupied with the same problem : what it meant to translate
absolute theory into practice
.
8 0
The only unique characteristic about
Bauer is that he managed to attain a university post 8
7
More serious
perhaps than the question of who is and who is not a Young He-
gelian, is a metaphysical problem which, given the stated purpose
of the book, need not be raised but which, if raised by a meta-
physician of Lobkowicz 's stature, should be thoroughly explored . An
earlier reviewer described Lobkowicz
'
s metaphysics as Thomist
in
the perjorative sense of the term
; 8
there is some justice in the identi-
fication, one suspects, but little in the innuendo
. The problem is of
metaphysical significance because Marx and, more importantly,
Hegel denied the reality of human nature while, at least in the
example of Hegel, upholding the reality of metaphysics, specifically
a metaphysics of self-actualization which does not necessarily dissolve
into a mystical gnosticism and alchemy 8 9
A consideration of a
meontological metaphysics of selfhood might provide a more ade-
quate analysis of what has been called
authentic existence
which,
in the context of alienation, may be the significance of the
human
potentiality
which alienation reveals
.
9
A final comment concerns
Lobkowicz
s criticism of Hannah Arendt
'
s view of Marx . Arendt
argued that Marx
s paradoxical view, that labor is both what con-
stitutes man as man and that which will be abolished with the con-
B °Lobkowicz, p
. 215.
s ''Lobkowicz, p
. 239
. I might add, in passing, that a recent study by William
J
. Brazil],
The Y oung Hegelians (New Haven, 1970), places the religious
question as the central concern of the Young Hegelians . This principle of selec-
tion, despite its justification, has the unfortunate consequence of excluding
Marx, Engels and even Hess.
George Lichtheim, New York Review of Books
(11 April 1968), p
. 27.
Cf. Fackenheim,
op
. cit ., and also his study of Hegel, The Religious Dimen-
sion in Hegel
s
Thought
(Bloomington, Ind ., 1967).
so
Cf . Lobkowicz, p
. 315
. This is not to say that Lobkowicz
'
s treatment of
alienation as developed by Marx is deficient but only to suggest that beneath
Marx
s deficient symbolism, logical inconsistency and so on there may be a
metaphysical and not just a psychological thesis
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RECENT STUDIES ON MARX
213
summation of history, is the result of a failure to distinguish between
the truly different activities of labor
A rbeit) and work Her-
stellen)
9 1
Lobkowicz comments that Marx is not confused
: What
he wants to say is in fact quite simple
: the labor of our body can
achieve so radical a transformation of man and his world that it
ceases to be a burden and becomes a full expression of man's free-
dom
` Labor is man
'
s coming-to-be for himself within alienation or
as alienated man
; it transforms man
s condition to the extent that
eventually man will no longer have to labor in order to satisfy his
needs
. As far as I can see, Marx never intimated how this might
happen
. But one has only to imagine that one day man will produce
machines which service and even reproduce themselves to acknowl-
edge that this idea is far from being wildly Utopian
9 2
It is not
at all clear that Arendt
'
s objection and her argument are met by
Lobkowicz
s observation
: while machines can surely ease the pain
of labor, it is by no means clear that they can satisfy biological
needs
. Moreover, Arendt
'
s understanding of the significance of
man 's world and its relationship to the stability of man
s works
which constitute his world makes it more than dubious that the
world is a burden, or that freedom could ever be the consequence
of a world no longer a burden Indeed it may well be the
very threat of a
worldless activity of painless labor, perhaps tend-
ing the machines that reproduce themselves, that Arendt finds dis-
quieting. What is
wildly Utopian
is the notion that eventually
man will no longer have to labor
in order to satisfy his needs be-
cause labor is precisely the activity which satisfies needs
. Lobkowicz' s
comments, and the readiness to blur the distinction between labor
and work,
9 3
are particularly surprising in the light of his own very
careful initial distinctions .
9 4
IV
Of the three books under review, Lobkowicz
s is clearly the best.
He substantiates with sound philosophical and theological argument
the cruder, psychologically based opinions of Tucker . Moreover, he
9 1
H
. Arendt. The
Human Condition
(Chicago, 1958), pp . 104-105.
Lobkowicz, p
. 348
; the quotation is from Marx
s
Early Writings, p
. 203.
Cf. Lobkowicz, pp
. 333, 334, 338, 342.
9 4
Cf
. Lobkowicz, pp
. 3-15