Abstract

It is the avowed aim of Avineri’s study to "bring out the ambivalent indebtedness of Marx to the Hegelian tradition." This aim determines the central place of Marx’s concept of man in his discussion; for it was from Hegel and the young Hegelians that Marx drew the anthropological problematic which dominates his early writings. The Hegelian concept of Geist served the young Hegelians as the model for a philosophical conception of man, as a being exhibiting the unique dignity of his rational nature in a historical process through which he attains to freedom and self-knowledge. Carrying this aim out with the greatest clarity and completeness was Feuerbach, who, applying to Hegelian philosophy what Avineri calls his "transformative method," attempted to interpret Hegel’s "Spirit" and the speculative concepts through which it knows itself as false inversions of the self-consciousness of man as a natural, sensuous being. It was this method, applied to Hegel’s political philosophy, which resulted in what Avineri describes as "Marx’s first systematic work," the 1843 critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. A full chapter of Avineri’s book is devoted to this "most systematic of [Marx’s] writings on political theory." Avineri views the work as an immanent critique of Hegel’s philosophy of the state, focusing on Hegel’s failure adequately to comprehend the rationality of the actual. The cause of this failure was Hegel’s hypostatization of abstractions as the subjects of the social process; Marx’s application of the "transformative method" was an attempt to understand the specific character of the real human subjects who are the actual foundation of these speculative constructions. Avineri traces in detail the manner in which Marx confronts the speculative functions assigned by Hegel to monarchy, civil estates, and the state bureaucracy with the social realities represented by these speculative categories. Marx argues that the supposed universality of the state is an illusion, mystifying the social practice of modern society and confirmed by Hegel’s philosophical speculation. In fact, he argues, the "universal" interests of the state are only expressions of private interests in what Hegel called the sphere of "civil society," the realm of production and exchange. It is the relationships of men in this sphere which in Marx’s view constitute the true foundation for the rationality of the actual, and it was Hegel’s speculative inversion of the relationship of civil society and the state which was responsible for his failure to grasp this rationality. Marx’s stress on the sphere of civil society as the foundation for political life, the priority of man’s productive life over all other social relationships, is the characteristic Marxian form of the young Hegelian conversion of a speculative science of spirit into a philosophy of man. It was this priority, which Marx later referred to as the "universal result" of his early research, which continued to guide his later studies. Avineri proceeds to take up this theme in a chapter appropriately titled "Homo Faber."