Marx vs. Hegel: State, Freedom, and Social Reality

Introduction: Hegel's Influence on Marx

Karl Marx's philosophical and political views were undeniably influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Although Hegel died five years before Marx began attending university, Hegel's ideas had already become the standard against which all Prussian philosophers measured themselves, and the launching point for many new and influential philosophies, by the time Marx arrived on the scene. Although Marx appears to have somewhat embraced Hegel's concept of the dialectic, the primary way in which he was affected by his predecessor consisted of a rebellion against his core beliefs. Specifically, the way the two regarded human perception, reality, and the causality of events were almost completely opposed to one another.

The two most fundamentally disagreed upon both the role and the position of the state within society. Hegel believed that each nation was the manifestation of sovereign and unique political, philosophical, and religious notions; accordingly, individual drives for singular advantage were detrimental to the whole of society. Marx, however, objected to Hegel's conception of the state because it effectively placed reason and rationality on an oppressive throne in place of gods and kings. In this regard, Hegel was merely an advocate of the status quo. To Marx, humans were self-determining beings, and these abstractions prevented them from reaching their full potential. Ultimately, these differing perspectives resulted in the stark contrast between their beliefs regarding government and society.

Competing Views of Human Reality

Hegel believed that there was no objective reality independent of thought. Therefore, the phenomenon of the mind accounts for all the events that humans observe in the world, and the only true conceptions of the world are achieved through strict rationality. Hegel saw the events of history through the widest perspective imaginable; history, to Hegel, could be viewed through a lens that encompassed the entire planet and accounted for all human standpoints in order to create a single human standpoint. Life was defined as a universal search for ultimate intellectual understanding. A consequence of Hegel's notion of the synthesis of individual perspectives is that the political framework and the broad actions of a society must reflect the moral ethos of that society. In short, "Hegel used a radical methodology to reach conservative conclusions" (Wheen 1999, p. 22).

Marx, however, took the reverse view on human reality. He held that human knowledge automatically begins from our experiences with the outside world — from our sensations and perceptions — and that interaction between the person, the situation, and the material object is what conglomerates to form reality. Therefore, by contrast to Hegel, objective truth is not fully attainable through any synthesis of perspectives, because those perspectives are so fundamentally unique to each individual. This premise leads Marx to the conclusion that previous philosophers were merely successful in describing the world, but the task implied by his materialistic views is that the setting in which human reality plays itself out must be changed if the goal is to improve life (Strathern 2001, p. 52). These central philosophical differences were what eventually culminated in Marx's Marxism and Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

Hegel's Theory of the State and Freedom

Hegel's theory of the state drew from his observation that the insistence upon individual identity — put forward by Locke and others — failed to grasp the negative consequences visible throughout European political history (Pinkard 2000, p. 471). In other words, the routine assertion of individual freedom had categorically contributed to the limitation and oppression of that very freedom. The pervasive self-doubt regarding cultural norms and commitments, evident in thinkers such as Hume, was in his view an elemental cause of death and destruction in the world. His understanding of the dialectic brought him to the conclusion that massive social movements aiming to achieve personal freedoms must be seen in contrast to the acquisition of social freedom, which was something entirely different.

To Hegel, this represented the total fracturing of social perspective — a trajectory that traveled from the nearly unified social thought of the Greek philosophers to the seemingly infinite points of view held by his contemporaries. The thing that could hold the modern world together, however, was a proper understanding of rationality: "The problem with modern life was that its rationality was not immediately apparent to its participants; for that, one required a set of reflective practices that could display and demonstrate the rationality of modern life, namely, those involved in modern art, modern religion, and, most importantly, modern philosophy" (Pinkard 2000, p. 472). Accordingly, the way that actions could be designated as right or wrong was by considering one's stance relative to these prevailing social constructs of rationality.

Freedom, too, was defined by Hegel along analogous lines of reasoning. Morally right actions are the realization of freedom; a person's position within society determines his obligations, and fulfilling those obligations willfully is the embodiment of freedom. "Freedom must consist of a fully reciprocal, mutual imposition of norms, not in the one-sided imposition of norms by one person or group on another" (Pinkard 2000, p. 474). Essentially, a person must be able to reason practically about what he is able to do, what he is obligated to do, and most importantly, what good he is attempting to achieve. The difficulty is that our limited perspective — we are required to see the world through a single pair of eyes — grants our ideas a certain level of negativity that needs to be eradicated through the appropriate application of reason. This negativity means that there are no obvious truths available to modern people; consequently, maxims of action are required within any society to appropriately determine how each individual should act. This accounts for the necessary existence of laws and penal systems, a universally adopted religion, a sovereign power, and a common philosophy. Freedom could only be maintained by widely and rationally adopting these social institutions, and abiding by them in accordance with our obligations to ourselves and to humanity as a whole.