Hegel, Marx, And The English State

David MacGregor

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367004163
• eBook ISBN: 9780429719127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this radically revised intellectual portrait of Hegel and Marx that challenges standard interpretations of their political theory, David MacGregor considers the nature of the state in capitalist society. This is the first book to place Marx's and Hegel's political thought directly into social and historical context. Revealing the revolutionary c

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Introduction

Classics are earlier works of human exploration which are given a privileged status vis-à-vis contemporary explorations in the same field. The concept of privileged status means that contemporary practitioners of the discipline in question believe that they can learn as much about their field through understanding this earlier work as they can from the work of their own contemporaries. … It is because of this privileged position that exegesis and reinterpretation of the classics—within or without a historical context—become conspicuous currents in various disciplines, for what is perceived to be the “true meaning” of a classical work has broad repercussions.

—Jeffrey C. Alexander, “The Centrality of the Classics” (1987:12)

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within. I’m coming now I’m coming to reward them. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

—Leonard Cohen, “First We Take Manhattan” (1988)

1. Hirschman’s Riddle

Almost twenty years ago A. O. Hirschman (1973; 1981) pointed to the remarkable similarity between the theory of imperialism developed by J. A. Hobson and Rosa Luxemburg in the early twentieth century, and the brief but lucid account of imperialism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. “There are a number of puzzles here,” Hirschman wrote. “First of all, how did Hegel come to express these ‘premature’ thoughts?” Why, he wondered, had Marx missed the striking implications of Hegel’s text? Moreover, why had Marx’s followers themselves ignored Hegel in this regard? Adding to the original mystery, the quandary opened up by the eminent economist has been ignored ever since by Marxists (and by many Hegelians).

The theory of imperialism is largely outside the scope of this study, which concentrates on the English domestic scene between 1831 and 1867. But the book does explore an enigma closely related to the one unearthed by Hirschman. I argue that Hegel developed a profound and radical critique of nineteenth century English capitalism, and offered a theory of politics that addresses many of the deepest problems of advanced industrial society. I contend further that Marx was aware of this critique, and employed Hegel’s political insights in his epic account of the British state in Capital. As in the example of Hegel and imperialism, however, a signal aspect of Marx’s (Hegelian) confrontation with the English state is its almost total absence from the bulky literature on both Marx and Hegel.

The version of the Hegel-Marx relationship constructed in these pages may confuse readers familiar with the conventional view. Am I trying to build a right-wing Marx or a left-wing Hegel?¹ Perhaps the best answer is to describe how I came to this investigation in the first place. Afterwards, I will briefly outline the background and argument of the book, and acknowledge the many debts incurred in the seven years spent writing it.

2. Influences

As a twenty year-old university student in 1963 I went to bed almost every night with Volume One of Capital, a glass of milk, and some cheese and crackers. Until long afterward, I never thought of Marx without remembering my delicious nighttime snack. Nevertheless, I was not studying Marx simply as a gourmand. It made perfect sense for me to scrutinize him as preparation for entering the Public Service of Canada. Like many young people at the time, I thought problems of poverty and economic depression could be solved by an activist government staffed with socially-aware, highly educated and zealous civil servants. Marx (spiked with a bit of Keynes) should be a perfect guide for such an effort, I thought, especially with the way he wrote about the heroic factory inspectors in Capital. Marx’s civil servants were role models who would, I hoped, illuminate my career in government.

After studying under Z. A. Jordan, John Porter, and others at Carleton University who knew a lot about Marx and Weber,² and bureaucracy,³ I became a public servant, and—as a sociologist evaluating innovative social programs for the poor in the early 1970s—got to know and admire many dedicated women and men in the Ottawa bureaucracy. This was the state machine that produced the universally respected Canada Medicare program, among others, and which initiated radical community-run job creation projects. By the mid-seventies, however, the steam had gone out of the reforming impulse; disappointment in the limitations of government stimulated my departure. I went to the London School of Economics, where Professor Donald MacRae introduced me to Hegel.

Later, while teaching at King’s College (University of Western Ontario), I couldn’t shake a nagging question. Where were the factory inspectors in the commentaries about Marx? Why did no one mention the clear affinity between Marx’s activist civil servants in Capital, and Hegel’s celebration of bureaucrats in the Philosophy of Right? There were some hints about this in Stanley Hyman’s (1962) excellent but now forgotten The Tangled Bank, and a few other places, such as Hobsbawm’s Industry and Empire (1972). That was all. It occurred to me that if such a book were to exist I would have to write it.

While an important ingredient in this study, the story of Marx and the factory inspectors (Chapter Nine) forms only part of a larger canvass. I interpret the role of public servants in Capital in the context of Marx’s social and political theory, and its relation to Hegelian thought. Wherever possible, I have tried to illustrate Marx’s and Hegel’s project with historical examples. I have done this to help elucidate difficult ideas, and also to keep in the forefront Marx and Hegel as beings in time, persons with their own history.

3. Problems of British History

I am not an historian or a specialist in historical sociology, and professionals in the field may smile or wince at errors that occur in this book, despite my efforts and the guidance of concerned colleagues. The problem is compounded because I have had to intrude into many of the “burgeoning and proliferating subspecialisms” that now characterize the study of England’s past, including “social history, urban history, family history, women’s history, the history of childhood, [and] the new economic history” (Cannadine 1990: 5). Still, there is an historical point of view that will become obvious from citations in the text. I have been influenced by the school of British history that, according to Professor Cannadine (1987:173, 190), produced “a welfare state version of the past.” Chief among the “welfare-state Whigs” to whom this study is indebted are David Roberts (1960), Oliver MacDonagh (1977), Maurice Walton Thomas (1948), D. Fraser (1984) and the women who chronicled the Factory Acts, B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison (1966). Like countless other toilers in this branch of British history, I have also profited from the writings of Norman Gash, Asa Briggs, Ivy Pinchbeck, Wanda Neff, Cedi Driver, Martha Hewitt, J. T. Ward, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Neil Smelser, F. M. L. Thompson, Michael Brock, John Cannon, and (especially) Harold Perkin.

Tom Nairn (1988) has charted the morass of names of the small group of islands off the coast of Europe with which this study is concerned. As Nairn shows, there is much that is political in the decision whether to name them (or some of them) Britain, Great Britain, Britannia, the United Kingdom, England, or the British Isles. Neither Hegel nor Marx had this problem. For them, England was England, and included (most of the time) Scotland, Ireland and Wales.⁴ I have adopted their terminology, with a few exceptions, because it reflects their understanding of the times. The convention unavoidably falsifies things, of course. Most of the “English” thinkers who influenced Hegel, including Smith, Steuart, Ferguson, and Hume were Scots. Leonard Horner, chief factory inspector, a founder of the University of London and leading member of the Geological Society, brother of the famous economist and parliamentarian Francis Horner, and long-time intimate of Charles Darwin, was from Edinburgh.

Similarly, I have adopted the nineteenth century demarcation between infants and children. One hundred years ago the term infant could mean a child up to age six or seven. The distinction was critical in the era of the factory when employment of children under the age of seven was common, even though their physical and mental capacities were much inferior to older cousins and siblings. In Victorian Britain, most factory operatives were female, but the masculine pronoun is widely used in theoretical and historical works. I have abandoned this convention, and mostly use the female pronoun when referring to the English worker.

4. The Approach to Hegel and Marx

Perhaps because Hegel is the greatest of all modern thinkers, and therefore the most troubling, the quality of commentary on him differs from that which obtains with such classic writers as Rousseau, Kant, Hobbes, Montesquieu, and even Marx. Interpreters might differ with these latter authors, but a hushed solemnity prevails nevertheless. With Hegel, useful commentary often comes mixed with gratuitous faultfinding.⁵ Pelczynski (1964:136) suggests this is because Hegel’s romantic metaphysics repels contemporary readers. It may also indicate a robust freedom of opinion in Hegel studies lacking elsewhere, at least if freedom is understood as divergence from, and hostility to, a thinker. In any event, you will find few criticisms of Hegel in this book. I intend to show the strength of Hegel’s politics, not its weakness; to praise Hegel rather than deconstruct him. Similarly, with Marx my differences are few, and these mostly relate to his misunderstanding of Hegel.⁶

Some readers may dismiss this study as yet another entry into what Harold Perkin (1981: 228) calls, “the sociological hagiography of ‘great thinkers.’” Indeed nothing could be easier than to detect errors of fact and interpretation in the writings of a long-dead philosopher who like everyone else, was “a child of his time” (Hegel 1976: 11). Further, it would be absurd to make out that Hegel (or Marx) did not make mistakes. What I want to suggest is that their contributions illuminate, as well as reflect, their own period, and they point to a new understanding of our own epoch.

Hegel (1975: 36) defined metaphysics as “the science of things set and held in thoughts—thoughts accredited able to express the essential reality of things.” I take this to mean that Hegel (as well as Marx) wrote for the future as well as for his own time, that he intended his writing to have an impact on generations after him (Smith 1989:14). This is the spirit I have found in studies on Hegel that have guided my own view, including the text and commentaries of the great English translators of Hegel, William Wallace, J. B. Baillie, T. M. Knox, and A. V. Miller; and the exemplary scholarship of H. S. Harris, Duncan Forbes and Z. A. Pelcynski.⁷ I have learned also from the grand tradition of “Western Marxism” (Anderson 1976)—the Russian, Italian, French, German and East European scholars who kept alive the radical vision of Hegel and Marx. The magnificent Hegel journal The Owl of Minerva, edited by Lawrence Stepelevich, has been an indispensable resource in writing this book.

R. N. Berki (1983) has exposed the controlling problem of Marx’s thought: how can one be scientific and yet work with a vision of the future? How can empirical analysis be made to conform with political desire? To deal with this dilemma Marx borrowed the Hegelian dialectical method, which brings shifting levels of analysis into a single whole. Hegel’s own success with the procedure is indicated by the conflicting interpretations that have been made of his thought. You can find the conservative, or the liberal, or even the communist Hegel. Especially regarding a theory of the state, Marx decided to contend with the tension between realistic analysis and political vision by not directly saying anything at all.

Now that communism as a system of government has collapsed almost everywhere in the world, Marx’s dilemma is with us even more urgently than before. When the Soviet Union or Hungary or Poland existed as functioning communist republics it was at least possible for the theorist to point to something real, even if this was just to debunk communism, or show what communism should not be, or what it inevitably must be. With the disappearance of communism as a reality, the ideal must again take its place. This is why, I think, scholars will eventually join Marx in turning back to Hegel for guidance. Hegel showed how to account for the existing world while constructing an ideal. The alternative to his dialectic is to rest comfortably with an eternally unchanging capitalist world, the end of history.

5. Structure of the Argument

Interpretations of the relation between Hegel and Marx once hinged on what was held to be a seismic difference between their respective historical periods. Hegel was assumed to have written in, and about, an almost feudal Germany, while occasionally peeking out from the continent to dimly espy a still embryonic industrial England. By contrast, Marx lived in the era of high capitalism, surrounded by the clamor of a mighty commercial machine. The standard periodization of Hegel and Marx exaggerated the differences between their historical experience, and understated Hegel’s deep fascination with England. It also missed a momentous societal change. The industrial revolution in England was fifty years old by the time Hegel wrote the Philosophy of Right; the phenomena of industrial capitalism that subsequently captured Marx’s attention were already in place. What was missing in Hegel’s time, however, and what did appear in Marx’s, was the new interventionist state.

Chapter Two interprets Hegel’s 1831 article on the English Reform Bill in light of recent scholarship on Victorian England. I show that Hegel’s essay relied upon, and illustrated, some pivotal concepts in his political theory, including property, social class, democracy, elite rule, and the nature of the state. His essay also demonstrated a better understanding of the character of English politics than Marx was able to achieve. While the latter proposed that capital ruled the English state, Hegel saw that aristocrats were firmly in charge, and likely to remain so for some time. Hegel remarked often on the absence of a real state in England, the lack of an effective countervailing force to the sway of the market. He predicted that electoral reform, however inadequate, might unleash a new type of state power.

This novel form of political power took shape as the English Factory Acts, the first effective legislative interference in the workings of a mature capitalist economy. I argue in Chapter Three that Hegel’s influence helped the German revolutionary exiled in London to see the vast significance of the English political experiment, a significance that Marx’s contemporaries failed to grasp.

Chapter Four begins a detailed exploration of the key concepts in Hegel’s political theory that assisted Marx in his trailblazing account of the first interventionist state. Hegel’s notion of the sovereignty of the individual, and the vital importance of personality, are crucial for understanding Marx’s emphasis on the value of time for human development, and the world-historical import of the English Factory Acts. Yet Marx mishandled a major component of the Hegelian legacy. He replaced Hegel’s concept of private property, which includes the right of the worker to the product of labor, with the notion of surplus value and the negation of private ownership under communism. This meant that Marx’s ideal society lacked not only a state, but also most of the institutions in civil society required to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 “Not Reform but Revolution”
• 3 A Hegelian Marx
• 4 “Personality”
• 5 “The Father’s Arbitrary Will Within the Family”
• 6 Hegel’s Theory of Property, Part I: Possession and Use
• 7 Hegel’s Theory of Property, Part II: Class Consciousness
• 8 Dialectical Inversion of the “Free Contract”
• 9 Marx and the Factory Acts
• 10 The Rational State
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index