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Book Review
Savas Matsas

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2008

To cite this Article Matsas, Savas(2008)'Book Review',Critique,36:3,487 490 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03017600802434466 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03017600802434466

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Critique Vol. 36, No. 3, December 2008, pp. 487490

Book Review

Norman Levine: Divergent Paths*Hegel in Marxism and Engelsism Volume 1: The Hegelian Foundations of Marxs Method Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2006 ISBN 0-7391-1304-6 (paperback) The Hegel/Marx relation has continued to stir controversy for more than a hundred years, from Bernstein to Stalin and from the Frankfurt School to Louis Althusser, and closer to our days, with the analytical Marxists and, on the other side, the proponents of systematic dialectics like Chris Arthur and Tony Smith. Most of the time, debates on the Hegel/Marx connection are intertwined, both by defenders of that connection and by rejectionists, with attempts to disconnect the Marx/Engels relation. Apparently, the second violin, as Engels very modestly described himself, with all the simplifications linked to his work as publicist and propagandist of the young workers communist movement, looks like a much easier target for criticism than the Renaissance man who wrote Das Kapital. Norman Levine represents one of the most extreme cases of anti-Engels rejectionism. For more than three decades now, he has painstakingly tried to draw the divergent paths that were followed by Marx and Engels, and he has claimed to have separated Marxism and Engelsism from the beginning. The present book is the first volume in a project, bluntly and repeatedly defined by Levine himself as an act of surgery*more precisely, a double act of surgery. First, Levine tries to separate [surgically] Marx from Engels starting from their different, if not opposed way of appropriation of Hegel. The author distinguishes two periods for each, a rather arbitrary periodization mainly performed on a biobibliographical base: a first period of appropriation of Hegel by Marx, and by Engels from 1837 to 1850, and a second period from 1850 to their respective deaths. Volume 1 of Divergent Paths is limited to a focus on what Levine calls the first segment of the first period, which goes from 1837 to 1841 for Marx, and from 1837 to 1842, the year of his departure to Manchester, England, for Engels. Levine never denies, as others do, the importance and persistence of Hegels influence on Marx, particularly on method. But this historiographically correct assessment has to be followed by an epistemological correction. As he explains, his operation involves two steps: first, to locate the Hegelian elements in Marx, and then,
ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2008 Critique DOI: 10.1080/03017600802434466
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488 Book Review

to perform a second act of surgery extirpating all Hegelian tumors from Marx and Marxism, purging them from a source of permanent serious epistemological errors. After such multiple surgical operations, one should ask himself what comes out alive from the Marxian corpus after surgery . . . . There is a lot that has to be questioned in this procedure. In this review, we will limit our criticisms to a few crucial points. Let us return first to the surgical separation of Engels from Marx. The main argument by Levine is that their paths were diverging from the beginning, because of their divergent appropriation of Hegel. One of the main reasons for this, according to Levine, is that Marx was a real scholar, an academic who had completed his PhD successfully, while Engels never graduated from the gymnasium, never went to university, and did not acquire a doctorate (p. 146). What an amazing argument! It ignores the polyglot Engels well-documented extensive culture in many fields (he spoke 22 languages), and it dismisses him, with contempt, because this leading figure of the international workers movement did not comply with the petty prejudices of the most narrow-minded academic milieu! The bifurcation of Marxs and Engelss divergent paths, as it was said, is situated by Levine already in the first segment of the first period of appropriation of Hegel by them. Engels had an objectivist reading of Hegel, giving priority to the objective impersonal forces of history as the inexorable progress of the concept of freedom, while Marx had called for the transposition of the objective system into individual subjectivity (p. 200). The first evidence for Engelss objectivism is found by Levine in his letter to Friedrich Graeber on December 9, 1839February 5, 1840, where modern pantheism, history as the progress of the concept of freedom, and the priority of totality over the individual are mentioned. So from that moment Engelsism is founded. The original sin of 1839 establishes dialectical materialism, including its monstrous Stalinist form of Diamat. But Levine, anxious to ground his artificial image of Engels, misreads, as, unfortunately he does throughout his book, distorting or taking out of context the actual texts. Engels does say in his letter that he made his own Hegels idea of God and thus he was joining the ranks of modern pantheists [Engels quotation marks] as Leo and Hengstenberg say, knowing well that even the word pantheism arouses such colossal revulsion on the part of pastors who dont think.1 The 20-year-old Engels, formed in a long pietist tradition, clashed violently with the official representatives of that tradition and with the Evangelical Church, joining the left Young Hegelians. He counter-posed the rational Cyclopean building of Hegels philosophy to the obscurantist irrationalism of these pastors, adding ironically the statement that disturbed Levine: If, for example, the thought that world history is the development of the concept of freedom were to fall with all its weight on the neck of a
1

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F. Engels, Letters of the Young Engels 18381845 (London: Lawrence & Wishhart, 1976), p. 129.

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Bremen pastor*what sort of sigh would be give?2 In the same letter to Graeber, Engels takes notice of the degeneration of the right-wing Hegelians after the death of the Master, criticising them and their descent to individualism by stressing that Hegel distinguished the totality very sharply from the incomplete individual.3 Is that not so? Levine finds it to be a rejection of the role of the individual, an original sin making Engels automatically the forerunner of Vishinsky and Zhdanov. On the other side, counter-posed to an objectivist Engels, Marx is transformed into a subjectivist. Agency or causality for Marx was located in the individual or in human activity organized as a group, Levine writes. During the years 18391841, while he was under the influence of Bauer, Marx transferred subjectivity to the individual. In 1846, in The German Ideology, after his break with Bauer, Marx situated the center of subjectivity in the social forces of production (p. 208). Marx never identified subjectivity with the individual. And he never situated the center of subjectivity in the social forces of production; Stalin did that, giving a distorted, technological determinist interpretation to productive forces, raising their priority into the status of a mythic Subject of history. Apparently, Levine is completely confused on the basic principles of the materialist conception of history, omitting always the existence and role of the social productive relations. Social productive forces and productive relations belong to the sphere of objective social being; otherwise there is no priority of social being over social (and individual) consciousness, and no materialist basis for a Marxist conception of history. Levine ignores the dialectic of productive forces and productive relations and he speaks about a conflict between means and mode of production (p. 225), using terms (strangely enough for Levine, who abhors and wrongly identifies Bolshevism and Stalinism), similar to those of Stalinist Istmat. The relation of freedom and world history was central not solely for Engels but for Marx as well, during their formative years, in the transition from Hegel to historical materialist dialectics. No supersession of Hegelian speculative philosophy and dialectics is possible without dealing properly with the question of rational freedom, raised under the impact of the French Revolution to become the axis of German speculative idealism in its entirety, from Kant to Hegel. Reason and Freedom, Hegel wrote to Schelling in 1795, remain our password. For the young Marx, the question of freedom in history is central both in his doctoral dissertation on The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, and his preparatory Notebooks on the Epicurean Philosophy. Levine fails to grasp this, despite his extensive commentary on Marxs dissertation. He presents the young Marx of 18401841, still entangled in Hegelian speculative philosophy, as an accomplished materialist by automatic reflection of his actual object of study; because Democritus and Epicurus represent ancient materialism. Furthermore, he identifies Marxs position with that of Epicurus: In order to affirm
2 3

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Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 131.

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human freedom, Levine writes, Epicurus denied both positivism and natural determinism. On these issues, as well, Marx remained an Epicurean throughout his entire life (p. 213). Leaving aside the issue of the use of the modern term of positivism for currents in ancient philosophy, Marx never rejected natural determinism throughout his entire life; he grasped causality, objective natural-historical law, determinism in a dialectical not in a mechanical sense. In his dissertation, he compared and counter-posed Democritean blind necessity (which goes hand in hand with blind chance) to the Epicurean concept of declinatio rectae lineae, the deviation of the falling atoms from the straight line, opening, in this way, the possibility for freedom from blind necessity. But for Marx, this possibility revealed by Epicurus was still an abstract possibility, which would inescapably degenerate into fantasy if it was not grounded in being. Marx criticized Epicurus and his attempt to avoid the contradictions and reach ataraxy (non-disturbance) of consciousness: Abstract individuality is freedom from being, not freedom in being. It cannot shine in the light of being.4 Marx contra Epicurus seeks freedom in being, in a new world emerging after the end of a total world philosophy like that of Hegel. Levine contra Marx says exactly the opposite: that Marx was seeking the Epicurean kind of self-consciousness, an ataraxy that escapes contradiction and strife. (p. 215). Norman Levines book reflects the enormous difficulties for the reception of Marxian dialectics in an Anglo-American intellectual milieu dominated by the dead weight of the empiricist-pragmatist tradition; a tradition that always tries to escape contradiction and strife but now it finds it impossible as all the contradictions of declining capitalism come powerfully forward. SAVAS MATSAS

4 See Karl Marxs Doctoral Dissertation, in Karl MarxFrederick Engels Collected Works: Volume 1 Marx: 18351843 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 62.