Both Marx and Hegel follow Aristotle’s critique of Plato in setting themselves up against their predecessor’s abstract idealism. Hegel returned to Aristotle in criticizing Kant’s notion of Moralität by means of the notion of concrete ethical life (Sittlichkeit).
According to Hegel, the synthesis of morality as the subjective will and ethical life as a society’s concrete practices and realities, could not be achieved in the abstract form of a universal lawfulness, like the ‘categorical imperative’ (1991:162, 186). The problem lies less in the categorical imperative itself than in misunderstanding its basis for validity, the practical basis for its actual content. On Hegel’s reading, the failure of the French
Revolution followed as a consequence of the abstractness of its principles, the product of a misguided attempt to force content into an hypothetical form (on this point Hegel is sometimes compared with the English conservative Edmund Burke). Kant’s distinction between duty and inclination, which divides the moral imperative from one’s material disposition, is a false dichotomy. Hegel reframes the opposition as that between individual will (‘subjective’ ethical life) and the social system of rational institutions (‘objective’ ethical life) (Wood 1991:xii). When these two contradict, as in the classical Greek context depicted in Sophocles’ Antigone, the system of ethical life becomes tragic.
Marx contended, however, that Hegel’s concept of concrete ‘ethical life’ did not
protect him from also being one-sided and abstract. How does Marx make this claim?
Once again, we shall turn to the concept of praxis, this time contrasting it with Hegel’s notion of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). While Hegel’s concept is historicist and dialectical, Sittlichkeit, like Aristotle’s phronesis, lacks, in Marx’s view, the possibility of successful revolutionary activity. This becomes more apparent in Hegel’s later writings, which use the concept, according to Marx, in circular fashion “to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things” (Marx 1978:29; cf. Engels 1941:13). Hegel’s moral theory lacks concrete links to productive labour, and becomes an abstract category in a moral theory attached to contemporary bourgeois moral conventions but detached from contemporary material relations of production (precisely because of the alienation inherent in these relations of production). By the time of the Philosophy of Right, labour has become sidelined within the “system of needs” (Habermas 1973:162), a concept derived from Hegel’s appropriation of the Scottish Enlightenment’s concept of civil society.
Aristotle criticized Plato for being unrealistic. Hegel made the same criticism of Kant. Marx criticizes Hegel’s dialectical idealism not for being unrealistic, but for being upside-down: “With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again”
(Marx 1978:29). Idealistic philosophy mystifies the true relationship between ideas and material reality, making it impossible to recognize either the really existing social relations of exploitation or the actual ‘fluid movement’ of these social relations. In the dialectical idealism of Hegel’s ‘reason in history,’ it all seems to take place in the life of the mind, rather than in material reality. As Marx puts it, “In Hegel, therefore, the
negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence, effected precisely through negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the negation of the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged essence in its denial”
(1972:96). The ‘mobile nature’ of social life is revealed in thought, but simultaneously confined to thought; true existence seems to take place in philosophy (97).27 Hegel is the first to formulate a dialectical account of history, but he becomes as accommodationist as Aristotle, and Marx lumps Hegel and Aristotle with Plato, arguing that the real problem of abstract thought is not too much optimism about the way things could be (lack of realism), but too much acceptance of the way things are (lack of criticism).
Marx locates Hegel’s missteps in the Philosophy of Right’s depiction of the relationship between State and civil society. Adopting the Scottish concept of civil society, Hegel incorporated and integrated egoistic activity into a social whole, thus making a significant move beyond Aristotle’s model (Hönneth 1995:13). According to Hegel, civil society is the realm of individual pursuit of self-interest (Hegel 1991:190).
For Hegel this sphere constitutes an objective ‘system of needs’ (225). Following Adam Smith, following Mandeville (following Machiavelli), Hegel sees this egoistic sphere as producing public goods from private vices, that is to say, universals out of particulars.
But he does not want to call them vices; neither does he want to use an atomistic model of the social (220). Hegel’s model assumes a primordial sociality while walking the line between Rousseau and Hobbes. He argues that the relation between State and civil society, when mediated by guild-like corporations (Stand) dialectically enables the
27 Most famously: “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational” (Hegel 1991:20).
further development of Spirit, for
...[Spirit attains its actuality only through internal division, by imposing this limitation and finitude upon itself in [the shape of] natural needs and the continuum [Zusammenhang] of this external necessity, and in the very process of adapting itself to these limitations, by overcoming them and gaining its objective existence [Dasein] within them] Spirit is real only when by its own motion it divides itself, gives itself limit and finitude in the natural needs and the region of external necessity, and then, by moulding and shaping itself in them, overcomes them, and secures for itself an objective embodiment. (224)
By means of this dialectical process, the concretion of Spirit occurs in the citizens of the state, and “[their individuality [Einzelheit] and naturalness are raised...and subjectivity is educated in its particularity] the individual’s character is enlarged” (224).
Although Hegel wants to follow a dialectical movement, he retains a relatively cumulative notion of character development, one based, like Aristotle’s system, on virtues. The relationship between State and civil society, then, is one in which the self-interested sphere of civil society is sublated, emerging as the ethical realm of a State that takes care of the education (Bildung) of its citizens. This is not the revolutionary model of character that we find in Marx. Most importantly, for Marx, Hegel fails to address the general effects on class character. In conceiving of the dialectical reversal or cancellation of self-interest into ethical life at the level of the individual citizen, who is transformed from a self-interested actor into a conscientious civil servant (cf. MacGregor 1984), Hegel neglects the relations of production and the real material contradictions between classes, accepting, instead, the apparently functional-organicist model of society that Aristotle espoused, with the addition of the sphere of civil society. We will see such a
model again with Durkheim.
Marx accepts the conception of civil society as the realm of “egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community” (1972:40), but he does not accept society’s internal differentiation into the spheres of family, corporation, civil society, and State (especially the German state) as its final destination, or as a good thing in itself.
Capitalist social differentiation, the increased division of labour, enables increased productivity, but it is productivity tied to the domination and exploitation of a class increasingly divested of all property rights (the proletariat) by a class increasingly possessed of all property (the bourgeoisie). It is pure alienation. For there to be a truly social emancipation rather than a merely political emancipation, State and civil society must themselves be done away with (51). Marx states this in theses nine and ten of the
‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (109). The formation of the proletariat—a class to end all classes
—in the womb of capitalistic society, makes such a transformation possible. The
collective proletarian experience of capitalism generates class consciousness in the form of a ‘revolutionary Sittlichkeit’; rather than the phronesis Aristotle attributed to
experienced statesmen, the exploitation of the proletariat will produce a practical reaction, the educators will get their much needed education, and human activity will finally be recognized for its power to change circumstances.
Is such a ‘revolutionary Sittlichkeit’ likely to develop? And is such a
revolutionizing practice as Marx describes (insofar as he actually describes it) capable of doing away with State and civil society, or with class as such? The events of the 20th
century lend little support to such a viewpoint. Leaving this question aside, however, let us return to the question of Marx’s ‘strong program’ in the sociology of morality. We began by arguing that although Marx declines to pursue a science of morality in the abstract or in isolation from other spheres (i.e., especially the economic sphere), and though he rejects the possibility of doing this from a neutral standpoint, he does not reject the importance of moral criteria as such. Marx’s writings constantly try to undermine both ‘neutral’ economic discourse and hypocritical bourgeois moralizing. His approach attempts to generate a unified model. Marx shares this attitude with both Aristotle and Hegel, who criticize Plato and Kant, respectively, for their abstraction of moral questions from reality. He differs from Aristotle and Hegel, however, because he adds revolution.
Marx argues in favour of a form of revolutionizing practice that will negate capitalistic society and, along with it, the abstractions of citizenship and the obscurities of State and civil society. The bourgeois abstractions of Enlightenment rationality which, via social contract theory, forget history or read it upside-down, as Hegel does, must be exploded by praxis, which understands history and then sublates it by means of
revolution, “ridding itself of all the muck of ages” (Marx 1972:157) so that “the present dominates the past” (347); only through social revolution will merely political
emancipation become truly human emancipation.
But what is truly human emancipation? If the abstractions of contractarian and organicist models of social life produce a kind of forgetting, truly human emancipation must be a kind of re-membering. This, indeed, is what Marx describes. In a truly human
society, all are members, and the character of human species-being becomes fully transparent. The dissolution of class society leads to the constitution of a new classless society. While modern means of production are preserved and extended, relations of production are reconstituted as collectively organized endeavours.
Transparency is not merely a metaphor, here; it is the telos of the Marxian strong program, which is why the Marxian project is best expressed by an ocular model.
Bourgeois society begins the process of tearing away the ‘sentimental veil’ of feudal society by its competitive need to constantly revolutionize the instruments of production.
In the famous phrase, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” (338). What bourgeois society begins, communist society completes. This holds particularly for bourgeois values like the ‘popular prejudice’ of human equality, for once social relations are revealed in their truth, they can be transformed by revolution.
For Marx, social transparency entails full possession of our human senses. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels build their critique of German Idealist philosophy on the basis of its abstractness, its non-sensuousness. German philosophy reflects German society’s ‘illusory community’ (1972:124, 125, 129, 137, 139, 151, 152, 159, 161), which is based on an abstract and ‘imaginary’ (130, 131, 137, 158, 162, 163) conceptualization of social relations which have “won an existence independent of the individuals; a power which in the last resort can only be broken by a revolution” (159). The proletariat must come into direct opposition to the State in order to overthrow that State (164).
Overthrowing the State means doing away with the independent, estranged existence of human production (of commodities, the State, law, etc.), leaving only direct human relationships: “The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves” (157).
With revolution, the good life will finally be achieved, free of abstract bourgeois
moralizing, free of classes, State, and law; we will have a fully transparent social world.28 On the basis of this notion that pure transparency or immediacy (i.e.,
non-necessity of the mediation of the State) is the condition of the future communist society, Marx suggests that faith will not be necessary (1972:36).29 Once reality is no longer hidden by ideological mist, there is no more need to believe in the invisible, or to make it visible by means of imagination or abstraction. In the communist society, everything is transparent and everything is visible.30 To produce this transparency, revolution must dissolve the illusory hopes of bourgeois emancipation. This is perhaps the real difference between Marxian messianic eschatology and its traditional religious counterparts. Rather
28 Althusser’s critique of the “mirror myth of knowledge” (Althusser and Balibar 1979:19) is well known for its argument against knowledge as “the mere relation of vision” (19) and his argument that “we must abandon the mirror myths of immediate vision and reading, and conceive knowledge as a production” (24).
Indeed, Althusser has a general goal of limiting the power of metaphor in his analysis (26–27). He fails.
29 Universal visibility appears to entail the non-necessity of the ‘sociological imagination’ in the communist society. Was this why sociology was at a certain point deemed unnecessary (and therefore suppressed) in the Soviet Union (cf. Zilberman 1978)? See G.A. Cohen (1980) for a related argument. Of course, this also implies the non-necessity of dialectical thought, as such (cf. Adorno 1973:150). In practice, the demand for transparency, the demand that society take on, in Feuerbachian manner, the attributes of divinity (i.e., omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, etc.) became the basis, in Stalinist Russia, for the infinite expansion of surveillance. The messianic form, concepts of faith and of hope, and a less ironic use of the theological, returns to Marxism with Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin.
30 Visibility (‘seen’) and transparency (‘seen through’) have a rather contradictory relation, of course.
than the consummation of faith, the communist society makes faith unnecessary.
E. TRANSPARENCY VS. REFLECTION: MARX & THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
These somewhat simplistic claims about transparency bring us up against models of the social that are based upon a permanent obscurity or mediation in human consciousness due to its intersubjective and reflective character.31 In the section that follows, two such models will be considered. The first model is that found in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The second model is Hegel’s recognition model, taken primarily from the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit that deals with the master/slave dialectic, but developing under the influence of Axel Hönneth’s project, which developed from the work of his teacher, Habermas (1973:142–169), and focuses on Hegel’s earlier writings from Jena (Hönneth 1995). Marx makes the following argument with regard to these two sorts of models: while individual humans achieve full humanity only in social
relationships, “the intercourse of individuals” (1972:157) does not need to permanently include a moment of alienation, that is, a losing of the self in otherness in order to regain the self. Of course, ‘in all hitherto existing societies’ the fundamental dynamic has been class struggle; historically, social groups have come into being in competition with other social groups, defined by relative positions of domination and subordination, by the asymmetrical distribution of property and honour, freedoms and restrictions. But this competitive struggle for recognition, with its necessary detour of alienation and
estrangement, is not fundamental to human nature. The struggle for recognition can no
31 Or due to the fallibility or one-sidedness of reason, as in Weber’s reading of modernity through the notion of rationalization rather than alienation (cf. Löwith 1993).
more be successfully separated from productive labour than the theory of morality. The fundamental question, as he puts it in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, is species life, “the working-up of the objective world,” the ability to freely “form things in accordance with the laws of beauty” (1972:62).
In the communist society, the otherness involved in the objective world that we freely create by our activity involves objectification but not alienation (Lukács
1967:xxiv). Only our own will constrains our intercourse with the world and with others;
we have no illusions about the origins or meaning of this objective world. If there is reflection, it is an un-flickering reflection, without distortion. Alienation arises from concrete relations of production that consist “in tearing away from man the object of his production” (Marx 1972:62). Estrangement from others follows rather than preceding this condition: “an immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species being, is the estrangement of man from man” (63). Historical developments in labour and production initiate the fall into estrangement and alienation rather than these being a part of social relations as such.
Marx accepts that, historically, the phases of alienation humanity experienced in the different modes of production (i.e., primitive, ancient, feudal, and capitalistic), have enabled the emergence of the coming communist society, but this future mode of society will bring an end to alienation. Therefore, Marx’s notion of self-transparency, whether tied to the so-called ‘early Marx’ concept of ‘species life’ or not, cannot, in the end, be based on a reflective social psychology of the sort embodied either in Smith’s ‘man
within the breast’ or in Hegel’s model of recognition. The problem of recognition, like the problem of morality, must not be dealt with independently of economic considerations.
In his works of political economy Marx cites Adam Smith more than anyone else except perhaps for David Ricardo. It may not seem surprising that he makes almost exclusive use of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN) in the context of economic discussions, but the economic topic of Capital, the Grundrisse, and other writings, does not fully explain why Marx never explicitly deals with Smith’s other major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter TMS). He does refers to it in a footnote in Capital (1978:579, n.2), and the ‘tranquility’ passages in the Grundrisse dealt with below could easily have been addressed to passages of TMS which contain arguments about labour identical with ones in WN. So why does Marx ignore Smith’s theory of morality?
The simple answer follows our claim that Marx did not want to take up
recognition as an isolated question: analyzing Smith’s theory of morals would waste time and confuse the reader. Marx’s strong program bars him from treating morality on its own. It is best treated as an ideological effect of material social relations. Treating it as an independent sphere simply reifies its force. In this Marx occupies a position at the
opposite end of the spectrum from Smith, whose division of spheres seemed so complete that it gave rise, amongst his 19th century German interpreters to ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’ (Teichgraeber 1981), namely, the difficulty of reconciling the basic thesis of WN, the human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (Smith 1952:6) with that of TMS, that sympathy for others forms the basis of the moral order.
This is all conjecture. Nowhere does Marx give an explicit explanation for
ignoring TMS. The real question concerns the significance a combined reading of WN and
ignoring TMS. The real question concerns the significance a combined reading of WN and