Abstract

Over the years Hegel’s social and political theory has often been measured against the more overtly revolutionary views of Karl Marx. More often than not, Hegel has been judged conservative, his ideas deemed lacking in critical force. Just what is meant by “critical” and “revolutionary” has not always been made conceptually clear; but nonetheless, despite the deep influence of Hegelian dialectics on Marx’s conception of history and on the methodology of his analysis of capital, it has been generally acknowledged that Marx was a more profound critic of the organization and inner dynamic of modern bourgeois society. Hegel’s supposed conservatism, traced back of course to those infamous comments in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, is by now a well rehearsed story. Yet even for many of those commentators who have tried to reconstruct the view of Hegel as a conservative political theorist, Hegel’s analysis of civil society falls short of providing the critical tools necessary to overcome the emerging problems of nineteenth century bourgeois society, let alone those of today. It is at this point that so many have turned to Marx for a more radical critique of the values and structures of capitalist society. Certainly among the many commentators in the tradition of Lukács and Marcuse, the revolutionary impetus toward liberation is to be found in the work of Marx and not Hegel.