From Marx to Hegel and Back: Capitalism, Critique, and Utopia

Description

The relation between Hegel and Marx is among the most interpreted in the history of philosophy. Given the contemporary renaissance of Marx and Marxist theories, how should we re-read the Hegel-Marx connection today? What place does Hegel have in contemporary critical thinking? Most schools of Marxism regard Marx's inversion of Hegel's dialectics as a progressive development, leaving behind Hegel's idealism by transforming it into a materialist critique of political economy. Other Marxist approaches argue that the mature Marx completely broke with Hegel. By contrast, this book offers a wide-ranging and innovative understanding of Hegel as an empirically informed theorist of the social, political, and economic world. It proposes a movement 'from Marx to Hegel and back', by exploring the intersections where the two thinkers can be read as mutually complementing or even reinforcing one another. With a particular focus on essential concepts like recognition, love, revolution, freedom, and the idea of critique, this new intervention into Hegelian and Marxian philosophy unifies the ethical content of Hegel's philosophy with the power of Marx's social and economic critique of the contemporary world.

Victoria Fareld is Associate Professor of Intellectual History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, Sweden. Hannes Kuch is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany.

A source of knowledge about contemporary critical theory. * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books * The legacy of Hegel's concepts and method within Marx's thinking is one of the most decisive and most contested issues in contemporary critical theory. In the last two decades, new interpretations of Hegel and a renewed interest in the diagnostic power of Marx's writings have challenged many of the established assumptions and made a full reassessment of that key theoretical nexus necessary. This volume, which brings together up-and-coming scholars and some of the best experts in the field, is a major contribution towards that goal. * Jean-Philippe Deranty, Associate Professor, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia * These vital and necessary essays argue for the renewal and refashioning of the radical tradition of Hegelian-Marxism. Collectively, the seek to install a materialist Hegel; an always Hegelian Marx; a formation of critical theory driven by the force of the negative and struggles for recognition; and, above all, for tomorrow's socialism in which social freedom and democratic self-determination might come to be. Urgent and important. * J.M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research, U.S.A. *