Decisively opened to Western capitalism in the 1990s, the former communist republics have been baptized with blood and soaked in Pepsi-Cola. As I started to write this book, in the summer of 1994, the Canadian Harvey’s burger chain and USA’s McDonald’s were fighting for space on Prague’s Wenceslas Square in the infant Czech Republic. Kellogg’s announced a Corn Flakes plant opening in Latvia. In the summer of 1996, the great newspaperPravda, founded by Lenin before the Russian Revolution, disappeared. It was closed by its two Greek owners who complained that the newspaper’s staff had become lazy and unmanageable. In...

This chapter will look at the ways Marx’s relationship with Hegel has been characterized, starting with Marx’s own assessment. We shall also learn how antagonism toward Hegel has affected the presentation of Marx’s connection with him.

First, I survey Marx’s own version of his relationship with Hegel, and then examine the distrust and hostility of many writers, including contemporary Marxists, toward Hegel. Two of the most influential accounts of the Hegel–Marx relationship – those provided by Georg Lukács and Friedrich Engels – are discussed. We shall discover that the presumed disparity between Hegel’s writings as a young man and his mature...

According to Engels’sLudwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, there is a direct line of development between the thought of Hegel and Marx. In Engels’s account, Hegel never entirely abandoned his radical past, and Marx remained loyal to the Hegelian influences of his youth. Unaware of Hegel’s writings before thePhenomenology, Engels had little reason to suspect a massive dislocation in the philosopher’s intellectual growth. Similarly, Engels suggested no significant displacement between the writings of the young Marx, and those of Marx’s maturity.

During the heyday of Hegel–Marx interpretation in the 1960s and 1970s, a large...

This chapter will look at some of the radical themes in Hegel’s development and connect them with his mature thinking. This provides an opportunity to re-evaluate not only Hegel’s politics as a whole, but his intellectual career. Hegel’s bitter critique of Christianity and his startling portrayal of Jesus Christ are intimately connected with the young philosopher’s democratic political vision – a youthful ideal that reflects the influence of his friend, the great poet Hölderlin. The chapter begins with a brief examination of Hegel’s life and education, and concludes with a discussion of his concept of the ‘external state’.

Hegel was born...

In his astonishing new biography of the author of Rights of Man, John Keane suggests that Tom Paine’s ‘eighteenth-century vision of a decent life . . . is undoubtedly more relevant’ to contemporary politics ‘than that of Marx, the figure most commonly identified with the nineteenth-and twentieth-century political project of bringing dignity and power to the wretched of the earth’. For Keane, the fall of communism has brought into question Marx’s political legacy while revivifying Tom Paine’s.

Not only is Paine’s bold rejection of tyranny and injustice as far-reaching as his nineteenth-century successor, but his practical proposals – as the collapse...

This chapter examines the oppressive political context in which Hegel responded to Schiller’s challenge to create a ‘State of Freedom’. The environment in which Hegel composed his ideas was much closer to the totalitarian atmosphere of communism during the Stalin period than it was to the free conditions experienced today by intellectuals in the West. Grasping Hegel’s thought requires sympathetic acknowledgement of the difficulties that intolerance placed upon writers in his time. The radical disjuncture often noted between Hegel’s early, unpublished writings and the published works of his maturity was, in part, a result of the prison-like climate in which...

What did the eighteen-year-old Marx learn when he stepped into Gans’s crowded lecture hall in Berlin? What arcane elements of Prussian and Roman law did Gans unfold before the teenage intellectual from the ancient Roman town in the Rhineland? Perhaps Marx sensed behind Gans’s expert theatrical lecture style the ghosts of Hegel and Sinclair and the unfulfilled revolutionary desires of Hölderlin, soon to die in his forlorn tower. Did he seize the revolutionary flame from Hegel’s gifted follower? This chapter – and the next two concluding ones – offer a glimpse of Hegel’s vision, its reception by Marx, and its promising future...

The institutional structures of Hegel’s rational state are in sharp contrast to the homogeneous world of Marx’s communism. Marx avoided drafting utopian blueprints for the future.¹ Perhaps Hegel was more daring. As I contend in this, and the concluding chapter, Hegel may have ventured further than Marx into the new world of struggle that was becoming visible through the smoke of nineteenth-century capitalism.

I begin by examining Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis. Fukuyama’s view is defective, but it highlights a central Hegelian argument: the liberal democratic state contains the basic outlines of a future rational order. Hegel, in my...

Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism, and his optimistic hopes for a better future, represent, I have proposed, a penetrating commentary on one side of Hegel’s political philosophy. Marx never really detached himself from the Hegelian heritage and so, as a consequence, there is more of Marx in Hegel than is usually thought.¹ Will Hutton observes that the fall of communism brought with it ‘a desire to return to capitalism red in tooth and claw, and a hardening of the view that the real world can be made to correspond to the nostrums of free market theory’. Yet, Hutton continues, ‘[w]ith...

I put forward my initial view of the Hegel–Marx relationship more than thirty years ago. A few scholars have now occupied positions close to my own ‘radical interpretation’¹ in their acknowledgement of Marx’s massive debt to the Berlin philosopher.² However, they reject my argument that ‘Hegel is a more radical thinker than Marx’.³ Burns correctly summarizes my central thesis:

MacGregor . . . argues that Hegel’s views are often the same as those of Marx. For example, according to MacGregor both Hegel and Marx are of the opinion that bourgeois property relations are fundamentally exploitative in character. Consequently, the...