Introduction: An Historical Survey of the Hegel-Marx Connection

‘To conjoin ... the names Hegel and Marx... is not so much to express a relationship as to raise a problem — one of the most challenging problems in the history of thought.’ 1 Without doubt, this ‘problem’ of connecting Hegel and Marx has been recurrent within Marxist discourse from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. By delineating the main lines of the historical development of this connection this Introduction contextualises the more detailed contributions that follow. What will be discovered is that the nature of Marx’s comments on Hegel’s philosophy has left an ambiguous legacy. One pervasive theme, though, is the interpretation of Hegel’s idealist philosophy as being shrouded in mysticism. Marx’s main contribution, according to this view, was to demystify Hegel’s thought through a more materialist, dialectical approach. At the same time, however, there have been those who have sought to rupture this Hegel-Marx connection and purge Hegelianism from Marxism altogether. Appropriate and expunge have therefore been the two main responses to Hegel’s influence on Marxism, as we shall see. To comprehend these developments fully, we need to return to the origins of the connection with Marx’s early involvement with the Young Hegelians. After elucidating Marx’s own comments on Hegel’s importance to Marxism, the trajectory of the connection through the main Marxist thinkers can be established. The final section illustrates recent developments of the connection, to which the current contributions are then related. 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.