An Unfinished Project: Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

This chapter seeks briefly to reconstruct Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and develop the intuition that the equivocations evident in Marx’s reading of this text were prematurely resolved in the promise of Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s ‘mystical dialectic’. I suggest that this reading of the Philosophy of Right and this conception of how to respond to it posed an unnecessary obstacle to the fulfilment of Marx and Engels’ own lifelong project: that of complementing their critique of political economy with a critique of the moral, legal and political forms of capitalist society. Not only does it blunt the edges of Hegel’s critique but in so doing it also deprives Marx and Engels of a much needed resource for overcoming pre-critical and naturalistic approaches to these ‘ideal’ elements of capitalist society. Instead of reading the Hegel-Marx relation through Marx’s own formulation of it, I suggest that a more productive alternative is to read the Philosophy of Right and Capital alongside one another as complementary critiques of the ‘ideal’ and ‘material’ elements of capitalist society: the one addressing the fetishism of the subject and the other addressing the fetishism of the object. It is not by reading what Marx says about Hegel but by reading what he does in Capital that we learn most about his relation to the Philosophy of Right . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.