Review of Tucker, Avineri and Lobkowicz

RECENT STUDIES ON MARX
The Social & Political Thought of Karl Marx . By Shlomo Avineri.

(Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1968) . Pp . viii, 269.
$5 .50 cloth, $2 .45 paper.
Philosophy & Myth in Karl Marx . By Robert C . Tucker. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1961) . Pp. 263 . $5 .50
cloth, $1 .95 paper.
Theory and Practice : History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx.
By Nicolas Lobkowicz . (Notre Dame : Notre Dame University
Press, 1967) . Pp . xvi, 442 . $8 .95.
on-ideological analyses of Marx ' s thought, of which the volumes
under review constitute a sample ; are free from the distorting
pressures of immediate political objectives . This condition for rational discussion does not however mean there will be agreement
either as to the genesis or significance of Marx 's views . Any study
of the prehistory of his speculations presupposes an explicit or implicit identification of what is central and what is peripheral, just as
any discussion of the body of Marx' s work must deal with its historical antecedents . Marx is concerned with the perennial questions:
the relationship between man and man, between man and nature,
and between man and God . He also dealt with historically contingent philosophical and social problems ; he inherited as well as
chose the Hegelian, or rather the Young Hegelian intellectual edifice,
the sentiments of romantic revolution, and the concerns of political
economy. Moreover, he left all three in a different state than he
found them . Theoretical analyses of Marx's writings must be concerned with both Marx ' s answer (or, in some instances, his nonanswer) to the perennial questions and with Marx 's place in the
stream of European intellectual history . Even if, in some measure,
such a treatment remains a desideratum, the modal interpretations
from which a comprehensive study could be fashioned have been
established : on the one hand it is argued that Marx is a commonsensical or even a philosophical analyst of individual and social
existence within the historical horizon provided by European and
North American industrialization . On the other, it is said that he
is a primitive religious enthusiast, an activist mystic who proselytized
a dogma of human self-salvation .
186
THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
Speaking very broadly, Avineri argues more for the first alternative while Tucker and Lobkowicz prefer the second.
I
Avineri begins his discussion with a consideration of the importance of Hegel-in particular, of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,
because " it is from Hegel ' s political philosophy that Marx works
toward the roots of the Hegelian system-and not the other way
round . " What Marx objects to in Hegel ' s political teaching is not
its intentions ("to bridge the gap between the rational and the
actual" ), but rather its "main institutional consequences, " which
" invested empirical reality with a philosophic halo " that it did not
deserve . Hegel 's Idea, "which should have been a criterion for judging reality, turns out to be a mere rationalization " ; it " leads to a
quietistic acceptance of the socio-political situation as it is, and
elevates a contemporary phase of history arbitrarily into a philosophic criterion . " 1 As early as March, 1843, Marx had mastered a
technique, originally invented by Feuerbach and known as the
" transformative method, " whereby the seemingly objectionable empirical implications of Hegel's political views could be tackled without destroying the entire system .' The result of Marx 's Feuerbachian
transformation is the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, a careful reading of which, as Avineri shows, " can demonstrate that the
distinctive patterns in Marx' s later thought had already taken shape
when he attacked Hegel in this work . "
Hegel ' s error, according to Marx, was that he confused subject
and predicate : sovereignty, the essence of the state, was conceived
as a subject while the real subject, the " concrete man, " was conceived as a predicate of the state. Marx does not deny this to be an
accurate observation of early nineteenth century German politics,
1 Avineri, pp . 13, 9, 14 . Hegel has not lacked defenders against Marx' s charge
that he provided a rationalization of the status quo . See, for example, the
articles by Knox, Pelczynski, and Avineri himself, in W . Kaufmann, ed ., Hegel's
Political Philosophy (New York, 1970) or the essays by Pelczynski, Shklar,
Ilting, and Berki in Z . A . Pelczynski, ed ., Hegel's Political Philosophy : Problems
and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1971).
Z Compare Marx' s letter to Ruge, 20 March 1842 with his letter also to Ruge,
of 13 March 1843 . Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin, 1963), vol.
XXVII, pp. 401,417.
sAvineri, p . 13
187
but he does deny Hegel ' s claim that the state is general and universal . Consequently, Marx denies the necessary mediation of civil
society between the particularity of the individual and the universality of the state . Indeed, there can be no mediation when one of
the elements is non-existent, and it is Marx 's argument that in
reality the state merely masquerades as universal ; the Sande which
Hegel saw as representing the general interest and the bureaucracy
which was to serve it are, Marx said, simply additional special interests . What Hegel attempted to do with his discussion of Stiinde
and bureaucracy was restore the classical distinction between the
public or general and the private or particular, in such a way that,
as in the Hellenic polis, the general or political determined the private or economic .' But, Marx objected, since no general interest
appears, the result is that some particular interests are sanctified
by being invested with an illusory general interest.
What does obtain is not Stande, Marx said, but classes . Unlike
the medieval reality denoted by the term and even more unlike
the classical polis, one ' s position in the household does not automatically affect one ' s position in politics . The shift from Stande to
class with the concomitant attrition of political obligations and responsibilities was initiated by the organization of nation states and
was completed, in principle, by the French Revolution which, as
expressed in its motto and battle cry, completely eliminated the
significance of social position for politics . But the formal universality of liberte, egalite, f raternite is simply a token for a thoroughly
particularist and arbitrary definition of politics as a predicate of civil
society . Now, since a man's position in civil society is a consequence
of his property, property relations as such are no longer private, as
they must be acording to both Hegel and Aristotle. But they are not
fully public either, as the universalist motto stands in contradiction
to apparent inequality in property relations . The contradiction between existing social relations and the expression given to them by
Hegel 's Philosophy of Right is a dilemma for people outside civil
society who lack property and therefore lack political visibility as
well .' These people, Marx says, are " less a class of civil society than
4 Cf . Aristotle,
Politics, 1252a1-1253a38.
5Cf . Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Tr. T . M . Knox (Oxford, 1952), para . 237245, especially Hegel' s discussion of the " rabble of paupers" created by poverty
and ressentiment (Emporung) . Para . 244, addition .
188
the basis upon which the strata of civil society rests and move ."'
That is, they are the very condition for the existence of civil society.
Avineri comments : " The circle is thus complete : since Hegel ' s theory
ignores the human subject, it must ultimately reach an institutionalization from which a whole stratum of human subjects will be
exluded . " 7 Even within civil society, classes which are politically
represented are not represented as subjects but as predicates of that
in virtue of which any social appearance at all is possible, namely
property . Furthermore, it is precisely entailed property, which Hegel
saw as providing an economic base sufficiently insulated from the
market forces of civil society to enable the nobility to devote themselves to the public bureaucracy, that Marx finds the most arbitrary of all : the absoluteness of an entailed estate makes it a kind
of absolute subject and "its" aristocratic bureaucrat is a kind of
absolute predicate .' The state per se is therefore both an epihenomenon of real social forces and a means whereby real social forces
are hidden from sight.
The discovery of real classes in real conflict, with no dialectical
ascent (Aufhebung) to the universality of the state implies that civil
society and the activity carried on in civil society rather than the
political realm and political activity are the center of concern . The
activity, of course, is economic, but Avineri is careful to point out
that the role of economics in Marx 's scheme is perhaps more subtle
than it is often made out to be : Marx does not postulate the abolition of class antagonisms because any economic mechanism points
in that direction . No economic analysis precedes his dictum about
the abolition of classes ; "they will be abolished (aufgehoben) because historical development has brought the tension between the
general and the particular to a point of no return . " The point of
no return has been achieved by capitalism, but capitalism, the essence of which is infinite accumulation, was made possible only
through the emergence of civil society as an autonomous sphere of
economic activity devoid of political or religious restraints . The
Werke, I, p . 284 . Later in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher Marx identified the proletariat as " a class of civil society which is not a class of civil
society . " Early Writings, Tr . T. Bottomore (London, 1963), p . 58.
7 Avineri, p . 26.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, para . 305-307 ; Marx, Werke I, pp . 303-05;
Avineri, pp . 27-31.
Avineri, p. 59 .
189
ecumenical expansion of capitalism which, as Marx puts it in the

Communist Manifesto, " batters down all Chinese walls, " has created
a new world of economic interdependence . 10 Moreover, the geographic universality is complemented by a universality of dependence : not, to be sure, the dependence of this individual man upon
this particular master but of all men upon all other men . The
dynamics of the capitalist mode of production and the intricacies of
the division of labor have created, Marx said, a universal interdependence of mankind ." Pointing to an inconspicuous passage in
Capital III, Avineri shows how Marx, as early as 1864, described
certain structural modifications of entrepreneurial capitalism, later
called the " Managerial Revolution, " that resulted from the process
of production but which were both unintended and unforseen by
capitalists themselves or by other economists . 12 Similarly, Marx
noted the change in British rule of its overseas empire in India from
the relatively straightforward economic exploitation, responsible to
Parliament, carried on by the East India Company to the almost
total anonymity of the later bureaucratic rule of India House . 13
The above account of a few themes in Marx ' s work which Avineri
treats seem to corroborate the view that Marx was first of all an
empirical social scientist or even a commonsense critic of Hegel.
For, was not what Marx said about capitalist production true? Had
it not established for the first time a worldwide economic structure?
Did not governments pursue policies, both foreign and domestic,
designed to increase productivity? Are we today not all too familiar
with huge private bureaucracies that are capitalist only through
linguistic indulgence? And likewise we know public bureaucracies
that suffer so little public scrutiny as to make them indistinguishable
from " private " corporations . Or again, when Marx called Hegel ' s
'Selected Works (New York, 1968), p . 39.

1 'As a matter of fact, Hegel made precisely the same point but draws quite
different conclusions in a text unknown to Marx, the so-called Jenaer Realphilosophie . See Avineri's discussion in " Labor, Alienation, and Social Classes
in Hegel' s Realphilosophie, " Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol . I No . 1 (Fall,
1971), pp . 103 if.
12Avineri, pp . 177-79 ; the passages cited are from Capital, III, Ed . F . Engels,
(New York, 1967), pp . 437-441 . See also the remarks of Ralf Dahrendorf,
Class & Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, 1959), pp . 41-48.
13See "The Government of India," New York Daily Tribune, 20 July 1853, in
Avineri, ed . Karl Marx on Colonization and Modernization (New York, 1968),
pp . 110-115 ; Werke, IX, pp. 181-87 .
190
notion of Mande obsolete and argued that his bureaucracy was just
another particularistic group within civil society, is there not more
than a grain of truth in his assertion? Assuredly, much of what Marx
said was and may be still applicable to the real situation of actual
workers, actual bureaucrats, actual capitalists and so on. But Marx
also implied that in Avineri ' s words, a " point of no return " had been
reached, that the Hegelian project of reconciling particularity with
universality had broken down, but also that Hegel ' s basic notion was
a sound one . What we would like to know, whatever the validity of
Marx's observations on economic, political and bureaucratic realities,
is what Marx thought of the significance of the facts he observed,
why he conceived them to constitute a point of no return, and what
lay " ahead . " In short, is what Marx meant also applicable to
reality, or has he constructed a speculative " reality " of his own devising, a "second reality " as it has been called . 14 Avineri 's caution in
this regard is understandable . If Marx not only told men what was
" going on under our very eyes, " 15 as he put it, but also provided
these facts with their real significance, that is one thing . One may
anticipate no extraordinary problems in textual explication . But, if
Marx is constructing a speculative system which provides a meaning
to the phenomena he describes on the basis of his own imagination,
and if he employs a philosophical or economic language in such a
way as to disguise, as well as he can, his own non-recognition of
the meaning of the historical and social existence of man, then a
formidable task of decoding arises . Avineri appears to fall between
these two fundamentally antithetical positions.
A closer scrutiny of one of Marx 's more potently evocative symbols may expose the difficulty . Marx argued that Hegel 's state was
an inverted reality ; the prescriptive trick therefore is obvious:
" reality must be inverted once more by the transformative method:
man must be made again into a subject ." Y8 In Marx's view, " true
society " which, like Hegel 's, reconciled the particular with the universal, could be achieved not through integration by the state of the
14E . Voegelin, Anamnesis : Zur Theorie der Geschichte and Politik (Munich,
1966), pp . 302-313 ; P. Berger, "The Problem of Multiple Realities : Alfred
Schutz and Robert Musil, " in M . Natanson, ed ., Phenomenology and Social
Reality : Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz (The Hague, 1970).
"The quote is from the Communist Manifesto, Selected Works, pp . 46-47.
16 Avineri, p. 32 .
191
particularity of civil society, but by the universalization of man who

abolishes both the property which makes of him a predicate and
the state which pretends to achieve universality . For Marx, when the
distinction between the particular and the universal is overcome,
man will have actualized his " true self, " which is identical with his
"social self ." A society of "true selves" is a "true society" or, as
Marx sometimes terms it, " true democracy ." Such a society is the
actualization of "man's communist essence" or "socialized man ." 1r
What one may reasonably expect from a political scientist giving
an exegesis of an argument such as the one Marx has made is a
concern with the meaning of the original Hegelian symbols such as
"subject, " "self, " or " reality " which clearly do not have any commonly accepted conceptual significance . What must " reality " be
if man can "invert" it? How can man be in a position to perform
this task? How can man be "made again " ? Is a "self" still a human
being? And if not, who is this new Adam and who is his creator?
Moreover, we would expect a closer scrutiny of Hegel ' s notions of
" particular" and " universal, " and how they rely for their significance
upon a view of history whose validity Avineri leaves unstated and
unexamined . Instead of a philosophical analysis of the symbols used,
Avineri accepts them at face value and passes on to an elemental
analysis of " true democracy" as if it were a perfectly ordinary term,
even though he shows that it has nothing to do with classical or
modern forms of government suggested by the word . He then points
out that it occupies a place in Marx ' s speculation akin to the place
which Christianity occupies in Feuerbach ' s . Here again, instead of
a critical exploration of Feuerbach ' s tricks, he gives a straightforward
comparison : just as the appearance of Christianity implied its eventual disappearance as the need for religion was abolished and transcended (auf gehoben) , "so [true] democracy as conceived by Marx
poses the question whether it is not at the same time the apex and
the transcendence (Aufhebung) of the political constitution, i .e . of
the state . . . . Not only the state disappears : civil society as a differentiated sphere of interest disappears as well . " i8 The resulting
" true society " is one in which the contradiction between public and
private is ended . There is no inquiry either into what this Au f hebung
17 Werke, I, pp . 283, 231 ; Avineri, pp . 31-34.

18Avineri, pp . 35-36 .
192
des Staats might likely mean as a pragmatic eventuality, nor is there
any theoretical analysis of the symbolism, its derivation, or its real

significance . This is surprising in the light of Avineri 's acute suggestion that the generalization of the Greek polis under conditions
of modern society is more likely to achieve Hobbes ' Leviathan than
Pericles' Athens ."
Avineri does provide us with an account of Marx 's appropriation
of Hegel's notion of universal class . As late as October, 1842, Marx
still wrote of `the poor" in a quite ordinary manner ; 20 it was only
after his reflections on Hegel ' s political views that the significance of
the proletariat as the "real " universal class emerged . The necessary
attributes of true universality are apparent from our earlier discussion : the class must be without political visibility and thus without
property ; it must have no particular interest but express, in the very
conditions of its existence, a human universality ; it must be totally
alienated from civil society . 2 ' When the condition of the proletariat
becomes coextensive with mankind there will be no more property,
no more particularism, no more civil society, and consequently no
more alienation . 22
In the following chapter Avineri explains Marx ' s teaching concerning the relationship between man and nature, the anthropology
which sustains Marx 's dramatic vision . He also answers a question
posed earlier, how Marx conceives of "reality " such that man can
"invert " it. Marx ' s epistemological "materialism, " he says, "occupies
a middle position between classical materialism and classical idealism, . . . it synthesizes the two traditions, it transcends the classic
dichotomy between subject and object . 723 Avineri amplifies this
opaque description by noting that Marx " derived his view that
reality is not mere objective datum, external to man, but is shaped
by him through consciousness" from Hegel's Phenomenology, so
that epistemology " ceases to be a merely reflective theory of cognition, and becomes the vehicle for shaping and moulding reality . "
And finally : "To Marx reality is always human reality not in the
19 Avineri, " Labor, Alienation and Social Classes, " p . 110.

LO See his article in the Rheinische Zeitung, 27 October 1842, Werke, I, p.
119 ; Avineri, p . 57.
21 Marx, Early Writings, pp . 58-59, 132-133.
22 Avineri, pp . 59-60.
23 Avineri, p. 69, cf . ; Richard J . Bernstein, Praxis and Action : Contemporary
Philosophies of Human Activity (Philadelphia, 1971), pp . 43-45 .
193
sense that man exists within nature, but in the sense that man shapes
nature . This act also shapes man and his relations to other human
beings. . . . " 24 It may be possible to give an intelligible interpretatation of Marx ' s epistemology from what Schelling has called
meontological metaphysics, but this is doubtful prima facie because
Marx confines his argument to what has been called man ' s " natural "
and "historical " situations . 26 Moreover, if we look carefully at
Marx's own explanation of the meaning of his words, we find the
difference between "nature " and "history" eroded and we are left
in a confusion of contradiction . 28 This confusion is present in Avineri 's commentary as well.
On the one hand, it would seem that " reality" is the same as
"nature " understood in a commonsense way as indicating external
things, rocks, trees and perhaps animals, in which case it makes a
kind of sense to say that man "shapes and moulds reality . " But in
order to labor upon nature, to "shape " it, man must also be " within "
nature in the sense that he shares some of the characteristics of nature-corporeity, for example . If men were without bodies there
would be no problem ; but if we are human rather than angelic, the
very condition for "shaping " nature is that we exist " within " it . At
the same time, however, if we were simply " shapers of nature " we
would be unaware of ourselves as "shapers . " If nevertheless, we are
aware of ourselves, even if it is simply an "artistic " awareness,27
then human reality is not exhaustively described by saying that man
"shapes" nature . On the other hand, it would appear that " reality"
means something quite different from " nature" as can be seen in an
analysis of Avineri's account of the relationship between "consciousness " and " reality . " Even with Hegel who attributed rather extraordinary powers to consciousness or, more exactly, to the self-consciousness of the wise man, the link to " reflective . . . cognition " was
never broken . 28 With Marx, and also with Avineri ' s explication,
there is a profound ambiguity . No one would wish to dispute the
24Avineri, pp . 68, 71.

25 See Emil Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee, 1961), for
a concise elaboration of the problems involved.
28See, for example, Marx ' s play with the connotations of "nature " in his
Early Writings, pp . 164-166, 206-207.
27 Avineri, pp . 73, 282.
28 Most emphatically in the famous passage of the Preface to the Philosophy
of Right, pp . 12-13 .
194
contention that external reality may be given significance through

the ability of consciousness to project ; indeed, what we mean by
instrumentally rational action is simply the ability to organize activity
in such a way as to achive a desired goal . But if consciousness were
simply instrumental rationality, we would be unable to decide which
goals are better than others . Moreover, we would be unable to raise,
let alone understand, the question of the meaning of our projects.
At the very least, consciousness implies an ability to "stand outside"
of the endless chain of practical projects ; it is only by " standing
outside" that we can raise questions of goodness and meaning . Moreover, if we ask questions concerning the whole project including
the instrumental consciousness that shapes each individual project,
then whatever . experience of reality follows, it cannot be simply another project of consciousness but, on the contrary, it must be experienced as an " objective datum, external to man . " The reason
is apparent enough : if we knew that "reality " was simply a consequence of conscious activity, if, that is, we knew that the meaning
of the whole of our project could be derived from consciousness as
well as experienced in consciousness we would also know that it was
not the whole but quite obviously a part.
Rational consciousness, in the emphatic sense of apprehending
reality as meaning which is not created by instrumentally rational
consciousness, implies among other things the reality of limits to
human projects . Contrarily, if there is no rational experience of the
externality of meaning, there is no intrinsic reason why there should
be any experience of the limitations of human projects, since all
apparent limits are simply the projects of conscious activity which
therefore can be transcended by further activity . But the structure
of reality is not altered simply because it is unrecognized . Rather,
such non-recognition exerts a kind of pressure on the argument
which is either to be resisted by dogmatic ukase or ignored by flights
of fancy prepared by non-sequiturs, unanalyzed terminology and so
on .
In particular, the absence of a notion of "limit," which reflectively expresses the reality that existence is not the whole of being,
is analyzed by Avineri in a passage from the 1844 manuscript where
Marx explains the genesis and transcendence of natural needs . 29
"Early Writings, pp . 206-07 ; Avineri, pp . 79-81 .
195
Needs are not simply "natural" in the sense of biological requirements, they are also "social and historical " and therefore determined,
in the end, by man himself . 30 Granted that there are certain biological aprioris, what is focal in Avineri ' s analysis is the " consciousness that will see the need for these particular objects as a human
need . " This consciousness is not apriori but rather is historically contingent . In a way this can only be true trivially : Cicero could not
possibly consider an automobile to be a "human need . " But this
triviality hides a more fundamental ambiguity, masked in Avineri ' s
presentation, which may be brought to light by the following questions : is there a distinction, in reality, between needs and wants or
desires? And if so, is this distinction better to be understood in terms
of changing objects of desire (e .g . chariots versus automobiles) or
changing conceptions of need (e .g . the automobile as a necessity)?
Or rather, is it not a more sound procedure to consign a "need " to
the realm of biology and examine desires, which presuppose the
satisfaction of needs, in terms of their inherent goodness and rationality? The example of Marx, cited by Avineri, of a small house
that seemed adequate until a palace was built nearby whence it was
seen as a mere " hut, " shows that " our desires and pleasures spring
from society " and thus are measured "by society and not by the
objects which serve for their satisfaction ." 31 Avineri' s gloss maintains Marx ' s original equivocation : " Since historical development
enriched human wants, they cannot be measured without being related to the modes of production which created them . " The point of
Marx and evidently of Avineri as well is not a prelude to an analysis
of base desires and wants, nor of the irrationality and uncertainty
of the measure provided by society,32 and certainly not of the significance of the tenth commandment . Rather, Avineri concludes that
since wants or "human needs" are not "naturalistic facts, . . . they
can be consciously mastered and directed . " We are blessed with an
implicit guarantee that if " human society can generate a certain
level of needs, one needs only adequate social organization to satisfy
them . If society had not reached that level of potential satisfaction,
30Cf.,
The German Ideology, Ed . S . Ryezanska, (Moscow, 1964), pp . 39 if.

31The quote is from " Wage Labour and Capital, " Selected Works, pp . 84-85;
Avineri, p . 80.
"See Avineri' s comments on Lindsay and Galbraith, p . 81 fn .1 .
196
the level of felt needs would not reach as high ." 33 On the basis of
this guarantee all wants in principle can be satisfied because they
are all mediated through consciousness and therefore are " human . "
The nihilistic implications of Marx ' s teaching are overlooked by
Avineri and he passes on to a consideration of the necessary presuppositions : if there are no limits established independent of our
desires that can be apprehended by reason, if all wants are to be
measured by society, and yet if also and at the same time there is
a real meaning to be found in conscious activity, it necessarily follows that man both creates the world and himself. 34 What is astonishing in all this is that while Avineri writes about Marx with a
straight face, as it were, he is also aware of the reason for Marx ' s
irrational refusal to recognize reality : " Man as creator of himself
and of his world also provides a criterion for the analysis of the conditions of his contemporary historical existence . Had Marx lacked
such a criterion, he could not have liberated himself from a relativist
positivism which . would of course have created an unbridgeable
gulf between history and philosophy, between the proletariat and the
revolution as the realization of man 's potentialities as homo faber ."
That is, if man were not creator of himself and his world, if there
were an " objective datum external to man " that situated and therefore limited man qua man, then indeed history would cease to be
the story of the coming of the proletarian revolution, the final
Auf hebung, and the perfection of man ' s self-creation.
Avineri is not always so uncritical . In both the Introduction and
the Epilogue he devotes a few excellent comments to what others
have seen as the centerpiece of Marx 's speculation, " turning the possibility of human redemption into an historical phenomenon about
to be realized here and now ."" Moreover, Avineri indicates the
Hegelian origins of Marx ' s " eschatology of the present ." 37 What he
does not do, but what nevertheless ought to be done, is explain the
theoretical illegitimacy of applying symbols which pertain to a class
of experiences devoted to man's relationship to God to the realm of
mundane affairs . Indeed, properly speaking the transformation is not
36
3SAvineri, p . 80.
34Avineri, pp . 84-85 ; cf Marx, Early Writings, p . 207.
36 Avineri, p . 86.
36 Avineri, p . 250.
37 Avineri, pp . 4, 250 .
197
Tucker says, is "understandable" and even "reasonable," but it is

" erroneous . " 42 Moreover, Tucker disagrees with the presuppositions
that governed the " basic question in the mind of an older generation
of students and critics of Marx 's system " -namely, " is it true? " Such
a question implied that the " chief problem " was one of "verification, " and presupposed that Marx 's first concern was to provide an
account of empirical events . 43 But this is the wrong question and it
is based on presuppositions which, Tucker says, are misleading:
" Marxism . . . did not arise out of an empirical study of economic
processes in modern society . " "Although he documented [his conception of capitalism] with materials from real economic history,
and thus made it appear economically real to many people, it was
not, even in his own time, descriptive of an actual capitalist economic system . " The view that Marx is now "obsolete," which presupposes the problem of verification, is also dismissed : " the assumption that Marx's doctrine represented a successful effort to explain
the social-economic phenomena of his time, that it was broadly
descriptive of the actual social world in which Marx lived " is "superficial" and " erroneous . " " Marx," Tucker concludes, " was not a
social scientist ." 44 In developing his interpretation of Marx, Tucker
provides us with a justification of these claims . But whatever its
completeness appears to be, Tucker's hermeneutical circle may be as
restricted as Avineri' s ; the answers he gives are reflected not just
in the questions he asks, but also in the presuppositions he accepts
and which may effectively obscure problems which Avineri confronts.
Tucker begins with a question : instead of Marx the philosophical
critic or empirical social scientist whose views are subject to verification or disproof, "may [his work] not be comprehended basically
as an ethical or religious system?"" None too scrupulous about
connotative distinction, Tucker concludes that indeed " Marx is unquestionably a moralist . " At the same time, he draws a very fine
distinction between a "moralist " and a " moral philosopher " based
upon two criteria : first, Marx does not follow the correct " form of
inquiry" which proceeds from "the Socratic tradition " and consists
42 Tucker, p . 125.
"Tucker, p . 12.
44Quotes from Tucker, pp . 218, 234, 227.
45Tucker, p . 14.
198
in "a methodical doubt, a suspension of commitment " as to what

constitutes the supreme good for man . Marx 's work violates this
criterion because : " It does not start by raising the question of the
supreme good for man or the criterion of right conduct ; these questions are not raised by Marx as questions ."'" In addition to this procedural exclusion of Marx from the company of " moral philosophers, " Tucker excludes him because it is impossible to ascribe one
or another familiar ethical positions to him . Marx is not an utilitarian because he criticized Bentham, nor is he a socialist because he
is not concerned with distributive justice . Nor again can Marx be
called a "moral futurist " as Popper argued .47 The argument is then
refined : Marx was "a moralist of the religious kind . " The "religious
essence" of Marxism is obscured by Marx ' s atheism, but, upon closer
examination, it turns out that Marx did have a notion of a " supreme
being" after all, "man ." Moreover, "from a structural viewpoint"
we can observe similarities between Marxism and " the Christian
religious system ." Specifically, both " provide an integrated, all-inclusive view of reality, " both view " all existence under the aspect of
history," both contain a " scheme " of redemption, and . both conjoin
" theory and practice . " The most important aspect, however, the
"master-theme of the system, " which "corresponds to the mastertheme of salvation of the soul in the Christian theology of history, " is
the idea of " a radical `change of self'" which produces " a wholly
new man . " 48
There is a certain robust vigor to Tucker ' s argument that cannot help but impress us . At a time when the articulate are devious
and those who hold to their views are consumed by their passion, it
is refreshing to encounter a strong argument . An admiration for
Tucker ' s frankness, however, cannot preclude us from drawing attention to certain deficiencies in his presentation . We have already
noted his indiscriminate identification of ethics with moralism with
religion . His rhetoric seems to say : "why not look at Marx as a
moralist or a religious thinker? " But then this conceptual liberality
contracts to a pinched stipulative precision as he distinguishes between moralist and moral philosopher only to broaden again as he
compares Marxism to " the Christian religious system . " Tucker' s
"Tucker, pp . 15-16.
47 Tucker, pp . 16-20.
48 A11 quotes are from Tucker, pp . 22-25 .
199
presentation, to say the least, lacks technical sophistication . First of

all, the notion of a " Christian religious system" ignores fundamental
theological differences among Christian groups ; moreover, it is questionable whether the term "system" has any meaning in a Christian
context . He also fails to discuss what is meant by a "structural viewpoint" from which Marxism and Christianity appear as similar
"systems . " It may be countered that such general objections to
Tucker ' s argument simply reflect an aesthetic judgment upon his
rhetoric. Surely, one might say, it is possible to recast his argument
in a more theoretically adequate vocabulary . The criticism offered
here is not simply of his rhetoric however, but also of the concepts
expressed in it ; one objects to Tucker's vocabulary precisely because
it is, upon close inspection, quite difficult to know what he means by
his use of words . For example, does his persistent use of the adjective
" medieval" in connection with Christianity imply any particular
theologian or philosopher, or any specific time period? Does it imply
perhaps that " modern " Christianity or Christianity without any
periodizing adjective is not, from a "structural viewpoint, " comparable to Marxism? One simply does not know.
Let us examine the argument which justifies the title of his book
so as to determine as clearly as possible the core of Tucker's thesis.
Hegel ' s " philosophy, " he says, provides the background to Marx 's
work : "Truly, Marxism may be seen as Hegelianism inverted.
Speaking very broadly, the relation between them may be described
as follows : Hegel represents the universe as a subjective process;
Marx, turning the system around, ends up by representing a subjective process as the universe-the social cosmos . " Marx really had
" gone beyond philosophy " but was it, as he claimed, to reality?
" Now it is quite true that he had an arresting vision of something
real . . . . But the reality that Marx apprehended and portrayed was
inner reality . The forces of which he was aware were subjective
forces, forces of the alienated human self, conceived, however, and
also perceived, as forces abroad in society ." Since "the decisive characteristic of mythic thought " is " that something by nature interior
is apprehended as exterior, that a drama of the inner life of man is
experienced and depicted as taking place in the outer world, " therefore, Marx " had gone beyond philosophy into that out of which
philosophy, ages ago, originated-myth ." 4s It would be a relatively
49A11 quotations are from Tucker, pp . 218-219 .
200
simple matter to call into question the adequacy of Tucker's understanding of the " decisive characteristic of mythic thought " 50 but
such an exercise would hardly be worth the effort, for it turns out
that Tucker is not really interested in the phenomenology of mythic
reality so much as the metaphorical or connotative aspects of the
word . Thus, for example, he writes that " Marx's Weltanschauung
has become a political mythology, a narrative associated with the
rites of single-party politics . " s' No doubt Marx can be conceived
as a " myth " maker, his system can be conceived as " religious, " and
Soviet party politics can be conceived as a " rite . " It is plain, however, that in order to conceive the phenomena the way Tucker would
have us, we must appreciate his rhetoric and ignore his lack of conceptual control . Apart from the wholly vague counsel to accept a
" structural viewpoint, " Tucker never tells us why Marx ought be
conceived as a " religious moralist . "
In part, Tucker ' s defective concepts appear only in light of the
more adequate theorizing about the relationship between secular
change and religious enthusiasm that has appeared since the publication of his book . We now possess an extensive and precise
vocabulary to analyze the phenomena involved . Research on millenarian movements in the non-industrial world provides an indispensable background for the re-examination of European and North
American social movements . 62 Studies on the experiences and symbolism of gnosticism, magic and alchemy as well as historical accounts of the transmission of symbols, 63 studies on specific problems
"Tucker mentions H. Frankfort et al ., Before Philosophy and E. Cassirer,

Language and Myth, though not directly in connection with his definition of
mythic thought (Tucker, p . 224 fn.) . A recent exposition of the complexities of
myth which, incidentally, takes issue with Tucker's authorities is G . S . Kirk,
Myth : Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley,
1971), pp . 101f, 263-268.
51 Tucker, p . 233.
52 Bibliographies can be found in any of the following representative works:
V . Lanternari, The Religious of the Oppressed : A Study of Modern Messianic
Cults, Tr., L. Sergio (New York, 1963) ; P. Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound:
A Study of "Cargo " Cults in Melanesia, 2nd ed . (New York, 1968) ; Sylvia L.
Thrupp, (ed .), Millennial Dreams and Action : Studies in Revolutionary Religious Movements (New York, 1970) ; W . E . Miihlmann et al. Chiliasmus and
Nativismus (Berlin, 1961) ; Archives des sociologies des religions, No. 4 and 5,
(1957-58).
5sIn this context one must mention the work of Hans Jonas, The Gnostic
Religion, 2nd ed, (Boston, 1963) ; Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible
201
of modern politics in general and Marx 's speculation in the context

of modernity have provided the elements of a proper interpretation
of Marx as a religious thinker . b " But, to return to our text, it turns
out that Tucker is not really interested in " religion " or even "myth"
but in psychology.
We quoted Tucker above to the effect that the " reality " involved
in Marx's "arresting vision" was an "inner reality ." More precisely,
it was the experience of " an alienated human self . " The origin of
Marx' s concept is still Hegel' s civil society . Marx "sought the
` anatomy ' of civil society in political economy, but the anatomy of
political economy, in turn, was given in the idea of ` politicaleconomic alienation . ' " The consequence was the notion of " the
alienated species-man or the species of alienated men, " who fulfilled the assigned roles in Marx ' s dramatic conflict . That is, " conflicting forces of the alienated self were thus conceived as external
social forces. " " Tucker objects to Marx projecting individual spirit ual disorder onto society in general because, while all men are born
into society, " Man is not born alienated, although he is born with
a potentiality of becoming an alienated individual . No matter how
many individual men may belong to this category, it is always an
individual matter ." es Alienation may befall a man but it is not an
independent category of existence which somehow he inherits at
birth. Indeed, Tucker explains, alienation is " an ancient psychiatric
term meaning loss of personal identity or the feeling of personal
identity " 67 so that the individual is an accomplice of society in the
creation of the alienated self.
Again, the language Tucker employs is not, technically speaking,
(New York, 1971) [French ed . 1956] ; A . Koyre, Mystiques, spirituals, alchemists du XVIe siecle allemand (Paris, 1955) ; C .G. Jung, Collected Works,
vol, XII (Princeton, 1968) ; N . Cohn, The Pursuit of the Milleinium, 2nd ed.
(New York, 1961).
"Here we need mention the work of Karl Lowith, Meaning in History
(Chicago, 1949) and From Hegel to Nietzsche (New York, 1969) [German
ed . 1941] ; Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago 1952), Science,
Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago, 1968) [German ed . 1959] and " The Formation of the Marxian Revolutionary Idea," Review of Politics, 12 (1950), 275302 ; J . L . Talmon, Political Messianism (New York, 1960) ; Gerhart Niemeyer, Between Nothingness and Paradise (Baton Rouge, 1971).
"Tucker, pp . 219-220.
"Tucker, p. 240.
"Tucker, p . 144 .
202
the best, but there is an important truth in what he says . Everybody

has reason to be dissatisfied, from time to time, with his situation.
It is not quite so reasonable to impute the cause of dissatisfaction to
the world rather than to the individual ; nor, even if the world is
" wrong, " or perhaps imperfect, does it necessarily follow that men
can do anything to make it "right . " Tucker shows quite well the
psychological dynamics of alienation as they appear in Marx ' s speculation and points out that what Marx thought was the descriptive
analysis of a social fact was in truth a sophisticated description of
Marx's own "neurosis . " 68 Even so, we still must discover what Marx
considered to be the true reality in virtue of which existing affairs
could be conceived as the consequence of alienation.
It is somewhat tedious to spell things out, but Tucker never
places the constituitive elements in their properly intimate relationship . Class conflict is a reflection of the self-alienation of mankind
in so far as the world and the self created by labor-power are used
to maintain unnatural and inhuman institutions such as religion, the
state and so on . The insight that the self and the world is created
by labor-power is the result of the Feuerbachian transformation of
Hegel 's notion which provided Geist with the same task . And how
was Geist and its activities understood by Marx? As the apotheosis
of man . Whether the joyful news that man had become divine was
expressed in the cryptic form of Hegel ' s code, openly in Feuerbach ' s
transformation of the code, or cryptically again in Marx's assimilation of Feuerbach's " humanism, " the experiential core which provides the trial from Hegel to Marx with its unity is retained : "man's
self-realization as a godlike being or, alternatively, as God ." 69
Marx ' s spiritual problems now appear in a different light : if he
learned from Hegel that man had become divine, and if he then
learned from Feuerbach that the divinity man achieved was imaginary, it was his own contribution to discover that within this
imaginary self-divination a true divination was proceeding apace.
If we return to reality for a moment, the significance of Marx's
position, no less than that of Hegel is clear : neither could abide the
condition of being human, neither could accept himself as creature.
"Tucker, pp . 1441f.
69 Tucker, p . 31 .
203
Marx 's alienation is self-alienation indeed . 60 It is the alienation of

a man possessed by an infinite desire to become God but whose desire is constantly thwarted by reality . Marx hailed Prometheus as his
patron but neglected to notice that Aeschylus considered Prometheus
"stricken with no small madness ."
III
Our main criticism of Tucker has been to point out a theoretical
sloppiness which can lead to a host of misleading conclusions even
when the general thrust of his argument is correct . His discussion
of Kant, for example, plays with the ambiguities of " reason " as a
commonsense term and as a highly specific technical term in Kant ' s
philosophy . 61 His identification of pride with something like original
sin is confusing, and his declaration that Hegelianism is simply an
"apologia for pride" ignores the dialectical subtlety of Hegel's position which combines a monumental self-confidence with an equally
monumental humility . 62 No similar comments can be made of the
third work under review . Lobkowicz is a master of classical, medieval, and modern philosophy . His tone is measured, his argument
precise . Unlike both Avineri and Tucker the title is excessively
modest so far as Marx is concerned : Theory and Practice provides
a lucid exposition of several of the major themes in Marx 's work beyond the notion of " the unity of theory and practice . " Lobkowicz' s
large book is the first part of an even larger account of the development of the concept of practice in Soviet philosophy. Moreover, his
method is less the defence of a thesis than the recounting of a history, keeping as close as possible to the empirical materials . Occasional explicitly critical passages serve to expose lacunae in an
argument, sophisms, inarticulate premises and so on . Such a presen66 The argument of this paragraph is in approximately the reverse order of
Tucker's argument . That is, he concludes with a consideration of myth in
Part IV, gives the substance of his psychological translation of Marx ' s "myth"
in Part III and provides us with the clinical, philosophical details of the
"psychology of aggrandizement" in Parts II and I.
61 Tucker, p . 38.
"Tucker, pp . 32, 67 . See Hegel' s statement concerning the share of the
"particular individual " in the advent of self-conscious spirit . Phanomenologie
des Geistes, ed . J . Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1952), pp . 58-59 .
204
tation no less than the sheer bulk and richness of narrative make a
complete analysis impossible . We can only summarize Lobkowicz' s
major additions to our understanding of the genesis of Marx' s
notion.
The first section contains a collection of "materials for a prehistory " to Marx' s treatment of theory and practice . It begins with
an account of the classical distinction between philosophical and
political dimensions of existence . Neoplatonic degradation of political
praxis into a cathartic preparation for a non- " theoretical " and
strictly contemplative mystical ecstasy, subsequent alterations to
contemplation provided by Christian demands for charity, and the
" post-theoretical" practice of Duns Scotus provide the necessary
background for the characteristically modern view exemplified by
Bacon and Descartes . For politics, the important factor was the
denial of the reality of tradition and practical knowledge : ethical
and political decisions, because they depended upon contingencies,
can never be taken on the basis of knowledge . This view is quite
different from Aristotle who argued that practical, that is, political
and ethical knowledge had a smaller degree of certainty because its
object was changing and contingent : "By reducing all knowledge
to one kind Descartes commits himself to a radical irrationalism in
those areas, most significantly ethics and politics, where mathematical
knowledge is irrelevant ." 63 Such a conclusion, despite the efforts
Spinoza, Malebranch, Leibniz, and even Locke to extend mathematics to the ethical and political realm, greatly disturbed Kant
who was committed both to a genuine ethics and to Cartesian
natural philosophy.
Kant' s well known solution was to divide reality in two : nonmetaphysical appearance is mathematical and the non-appearing,
non-theoretical is metaphysical. Knowledge having to do with the
natural world was "theoretical" ; knowledge having to do with the
"truly real " suprasensible world was " practical ." The one is studied
in terms of natural scientific concepts, the other is 'apprehended
through freedom . Freedom places man in a world additional to the
world of nature, but, because he is first of all in the world of nature,
moral, that is, " practical" laws appear as "oughts . " Theoretical,
scientific laws deal with "what is . " An "ought," an ideal, is by
definition remote from actual conduct, which is precisely Kant's
B3Lobkowicz, p . 119.
205
point : the laws of the intelligible world are not implemented, but
willed . Hence Kant' s famous aphorism that the only unqualified
good is a good will is based not upon the ontological status of the
good, but upon the status of will . But the ontological law of the will
is freedom which makes a good will simply obedience to the very
nature of will . The vast inflation of the commonsense observation
that a person has some choice about the life he leads implies that
" all except strictly physical laws are imposed upon man by himself,"" since man is free in everything but physical laws to define
his own place in the world.
Hegel 's contribution, in this context, appears as a rather simple
one : he treats will as a special mode of thought, in particular, as a
desire to have reality conform to "reason ." As history unfolds, the
importance of will and activity declines as reality achieves greater
and greater reasonableness . Pragmatically, there is a good deal of
ambiguity in Hegel ' s formula : after all, all men may not describe
"reality" in terms of its reasonableness . Lobkowicz argues that, for
Hegel, the reasonableness of the present is simply not problematic;
it is a fact of history that must be recognized . 65 . The notion, so
prominent in the preface to the Philosophy of Right, that " the
future holds nothing new " is also found, as Kojeve has argued, in
the Phdnomenologie . 88 When a thinker is of the opinion that history
has come to an end certain rather obvious psychological problems
arise that are less acute if the end of history is seen as a future
occasion . In particular, historical facts whose meaning is obvious to
everybody must be " reinterpreted" so as to have them conform to
the imaginary millennial present . Hegel' s method of achiving this
task, Lobkowicz argues, is to glorify the present by arguing that in
reality man is participating in God ' s eternal life, to secularize Christian eschatalogical symbols, and to develop a "science " which
comprehends the now secularized symbolisms in terms of the transfigured empirical events of actual history . 67
64Lobkowicz, p . 135.
66 In the Phfinomenologie Hegel issues a kind of spiritual death warrant on
those " representatives " of the public who resist recognizing the reasonableness
of reality . Philnomenologie, p . 58.
66A . Kojeve, Introduction a la Lecture de Hegel, 2nd ed . (Paris, 1947), pp.
280 ff, 442 . Lobkowicz gives a brief account of the pre-history of the symbolism
of "nothing new, " pp . 166-73.
67 Lobkowicz, pp . 174-181 .
206
What remained as the unshakeable experiential ground for the

speculations of Hegel ' s followers after the master's death in 1831
was the knowledge, vouchsafed to them in Hegel 's own words, that
man was in possession of absolute, all-embracing certainty . True
enough, the empirical world did not conform to absolute knowledge,
but that meant only that the activity which would transform reality
would literally save the world . The traditional political virtue, prudence, had no place . How could it? If one knows, past experience
is of no account, for "facts could be no real challenge to those who
knew ; they could always be reinterpreted or changed . " 68 The first
salvo was fired in 1833 with the publication of Friedrich Richter ' s
treatise on the Last Things which, inter alia, questioned the adequacy of Christian eschatology from the perspective of absolute
knowledge afforded by Hegelianism . Richter also pointed out that
the bliss provided by Hegelianism was purely speculative and had
nothing to do with the real world of men . Nevertheless, he insisted
that if the transfiguration of reality was meaningful to the intellect
of philosophers, there was no reason in principle why it could not
be meaningful to the rest of mankind as well .
Once the secret was out, a whole new set of problems arose,
particularly for men who were dissatisfied with reality, who considered it " irrational. " The theological debate, which wound its
tortuous way through Strauss ' "proofs" that the Gospel was myth
and Feuerbach ' s " proofs" that man was God, are simply continuations of what Richter began . New vistas, however, were opened by
two men : Bruno Bauer and August von Cieszkowski . Indeed,
Cieszkowski's small tract, the Prolegomena Zur Historiosophie, is
considered "the crucial link between the theological problems of
the early Hegelians and the political radicalism of thinkers such as
Hess and Marx. " 70 Hegel's error, Cieszkowski said, was to believe
that wisdom was only retrospective and absolute knowledge confined
to the past.' Cieszkowski countered that if Hegel could bring Kant' s
three absolutes of God, freedom and immortality within the purview
88 Lobkowicz, p. 185.
89 Lobkowicz' s study of Richter is based upon J . Gebhardt, Politik and
Eschatologie : Studien zur Geschichte der Hegelschen Schule in den Jahren
1830-1840 (Munich, 1963), pp . 71 if.
70 Lobkowicz, p . 202 ; cf. Avineri, pp. 124 ff.
71 The alternative formulation, favored by Kojcve, is that history had ended.
Either way the implications are the same. Cf. Kojcve, pp . 194, 284 f, 288f.
207
of his " science, " why not time as well? He answered by the construction of a view of universal history by means of a then current
trichotomy of historical progression. There were, he said, three ways
to know the future : by imagination, as with pre-Hegelian " seers
and prophets, " by thought, as with Hegel, and by action which was
the "direction, of the future . " The action involved was "post-theoretical, " it was the praxis of an absolute knower . " Man was now an
accomplice of the Absolute ; he could fulfill the aims of Providence
simply by acting according to reason, according to his own
reason . 7 72 Where Hegel transformed Kant ' s absolute moral will into
absolute thought, Cieszkowski succeeded in transforming absolute
thought back into absolute will, only unlike Kant, he placed it not
beyond " theory" but rather had it absorb theory on the way by . This
was important for one reason : if Rosenkranz was genuine in his
fear that the generation of philosophers which followed Hegel were
destined to be merely "gravediggers and monument builders, " 73 it
was Cieszkowski ' s great contribution to relieve the nervous anxiety
which the spectre of such occupations provoked in the young men
whose libido dominandi was equal to that of the master . For a man
such as Bruno Bauer however, even Cieszkowski would not do . True,
Cieszkowski differed with Hegel' s view that the absolute knower
akin to Minerva ' s Owl, but in his opinion that reality developed
alongside knowledge, Cieszkowski ' s " post-theoretical practice" was
not "critical ."
After having read Marx ' s sarcastic comments in the German
Ideology and The Holy Family, it is difficult to take Bauer ' s " criticism " very seriously . And yet, Bauer was simply a consistent Hegelian ; the only difference between him and Hegel was that for
Hegel the world was rational and hence to be justified while for
Bauer it was not and hence to be criticized . Bauer is comical only
because the world he critically annihilated remained untouched.
But exactly the same was true of Hegel' s "justified " world . Two
roads and two roads only were possible as the consequences of
"critical destruction " became apparent : either one could take the
road of Marx where criticism issued in political activity, or one
could remain faithful to criticism, secure in the knowledge that
72 Lobkowicz, p . 198.
"Karl Rosenkranz, Hegels Leben (Berlin, 1844), p . xix.
208
criticism alone was the way to truth . But even Marx did not take
his final path immediately ; in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right Marx is more realistic than Bauer only because he advocates
propaganda rather than an esoteric development of the truth, but
the premise, that the proper path lay in " criticism, " was not challenged . 44 Even so, Marx was the first to suggest an answer for a
problem that had bothered him even in his dissertation : if absolute
knowledge is not actualized, then it can hardly be absolute and if
criticism is necessary, then this fact is evidence that the critic 's knowledge is less than absolute . 75 Marx' s answer is that "real " or " practical" salvation may be attained in the deeds "of an extraphilosophical
humanity, or a part of it, which meets the theory half-way . " 76 If, as
Marx argued, salvation would come when humanity or its representative accepted "criticism " as its principle of action, then it
surely was possible to argue that such representatives had been destined for their salvific role by history in much the same way that
history destined Hegel to achieve absolute knowledge.
In fact, it is upon the basis of Marx 's "knowledge" that the
proletariat is the representative of mankind that his elaborate
speculation on alienation retains a degree of intelligibility . We begin
with the "knowledge" that the self-suppression of the proletariat as
a separate class establishes a socialist society, a society in which each
man acts as the representative of mankind . In this sense, socialist
society is simply a "goal, " a Kantian " ought . " But Marx also says
that proletarian self-suppression will be an Aufhebung of alienation,
a "negation of a negation . " One can' t have it both ways ; if indeed
human history is the laborious self-actualization of man 's speciesbeing, then Aufhebung must follow Aufhebung to its dialectical infinity, in which case socialist society must appear as an arbitrary
and premature totalization . On the other hand, the Kantian
" ought " is non-dialectical . The juxtaposition of dialectical and nondialectical elements is resolved to Marx ' s satisfaction because he can
conceive of the self-development of mankind as dialectical while the
"knowledge " of the telos of this process ensures that any merely
logical inconsistencies can be dismissed as " abstract . " Thus what
appears to be the premature totalization of an open dialectic is,
74For example,
Early Writings,
"See Lobkowicz, pp . 239-247.

76Lobkowicz, p . 276 .
p.
52.
209
in reality, Marx says, the radical disjunction between "pre-history "

and " history. " For socialist society, the past, and therefore all prior
societies and the self-actualization that went on in them, in fundamentally external . No wonder that when Marx spoke of "socialist
man" he demanded everyone else keep silent ."
Marx 's " knowledge " is also the inspiration for his furious polemics against the other Left Hegelians, in particular against Bauer
and Stirner . Against the first, his argument turns upon the relative
importance of economics and politics ; against the second, the truth
of Hegel's dialectical understanding of history and, as Lobkowicz
argues, it is important to keep both fronts distinct . Thanks to Engels' "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" which Marx read
early in 1844, " Marx discovered that the proletariat 's role in the
history of human emancipation might be described as due to the
socioeconomic nature of mankind's self-development- a discovery
which obviously suggested that the philosopher 's role was far less
central than either he or his Left Hegelian colleagues had believed ." 78
It also suggested a new role for the critic and a new subject for his
critique : through a critique of the reflection of reality in the discipline of political economy, Marx could seek to demonstrate that
the very principles of political economy imply the Au f hebung of
the world order they reflect. Once this truth, hidden in the abstrac tions of bourgeois political economy, is exposed to the proletariat,
it will become conscious of its necessary task ." It is from this perspective that Marx met Bauer's objection to mass action . He agreed
that all previous revolutions were failures, but added that this was
because the men who carried them out were not truly representative
of mankind . Thus, the premise of Bauer's critique was false, and his
former friend was critically annihilated by showing that Left Hegelianism generally was simply a reflection of an already condemned
world-order.
On the other front, Marx had to defend his position against the
77 Cf . Early Writings, pp. 165-166. Lobkowicz ; pp . 359-372.

78 Lobkowicz, p . 375.
79 Lobkowicz (p . 382) indicates that in a second volume he intends to show
that, when faced with the obvious fact that the bourgeoisie too could become
conscious of Marx's "laws " and so " amend " them (p . 376), that is, that the
real problem, pauperization of the proletariat, could be contained, if not exactly
" solved " by the incorporation of the trade unions into industrial society, new
explanations of the respite given to the bourgeoisie had to be concocted .
210
attack upon the entire Hegelian enterprise launched by " Stirner ' s
odd book, The Ego and Its Own . " S0 If we look upon the Hegelian
succession as a story of every-increasing profanation, from Hegel's
original reduction of the world-transcendent God to a world-immanent Geist, to the reduction of Christ by Strauss from the axis of
world history to a mythical symbol of the species divinity of mankind, to Feuerbach's transformation of God likewise into the divine
species and finally to the reduction of the divine humanity by Hess
and Marx to society, then " Stirner seems to have taken the next
logical step, and to have reduced everything from God, through
Mankind to Society, to the bare individual that each of us is ." 81
For Stirner, everything from Hegel ' s Geist to Marx's communism
was simply an "ideal" to be consumed by the insatiable individual
which alone retained reality . Such an objection had to be met . Stirner had gone too far in his eclipse of reality, for if everything were
simply a divertissement for an aggressive self, there was no point in
laboring to achieve socialism . Prior to the German Ideology, which
Lobkowicz suggests was aimed primarily at Stirner, SZ Marx had
never thought it necessary to argue why socialism was desirable;
the problem was always posed in terms of showing how socialism
was the " correct" consequence of Hegelianism . Stirner ' s attack on
Hegelianism in all its forms meant that the only reply that Marx
could make was to argue that the role of the proletariat was not
an " ideal, " and that his condemnation of the present world order
was simply a reflection of the laws of history, while everybody else's
was a reflection of the existing world-order . The answer to the
first problem was his notion of "historical materialism " ; the answer
to the second was his notion of "ideology . "
8OLobkowicz, p . 391.
81 Lobkowicz, " Karl Marx and Max Stirner, " in F . J . Adelmann, S . J ., ed.,
Demythologizing Marxism, Boston College Studies in Philosophy, Vol . II
(Chestnut Hill and the Hague, 1969), p . 75.
82His argument is inherently plausible : Marx and Engels both had more
interesting things on their minds than a return to what Engels called " this
theoretical twaddle . " After the publication of The Holy Family, there would
seem to be no reason critically to destroy " Bauer and Company" all over again.
But the publication of Stirner ' s book after The Holy Family demanded, if not
a public reply, then at least a private refutation, as indeed Marx called The
German Ideology some years later, "Preface to The Critique of Political
Economy," in Selected Works, p . 184 . Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice, pp.
403 ff ; cf . E. Voegelin, " The Eclipse of Reality" in Natanson, ed ., op . cit.,
pp . 188-89 .
211
This was surely an ingenious answer to Stirner, but it contains

a fundamental ambiguity. Marx claimed, early in the text of the
German Ideology, that the premises from which he began were not
dogmatic but " real . " Consequently, "these premises can be verified
in a purely empirical way . " 83 If Marx is, as he claimed, simply
describing reality, then what he is describing as " history " is, ab initio,
"revolutionary ." There is no need for "ideals" because reality is
already revolutionary ; but this is surely as unsatisfactory as Hegel ' s
claim that reality was "rational . " On the other hand, if there is a
truly revolutionary practice which is not simply what happens
anyhow, there must also be an " ideal " in precisely the sense that
Stirner criticized . Lobkowicz summarizes this " hopeless " ambiguity:
"if ideas formed in the human mind are `materially prescribed, '
nothing but the expression of objective necessities, then there is no
need to urge people to be ` practical, ' to act . On the other hand, if
there really is a `point ' in purposefully revolutionizing the existing
world, if it matters whether people `practically attack the change
given things '-that is, freely decide to do it rather than do it under
the pressure of existing circumstances-then undoubtedly there must
exist ideals which are more than only a reflection of circumstances
themselves . " S4 Again, one cannot have it both ways : communism
cannot both be necessary and be the object of deliberation and
action . Either Stirner is right, and Marx is a strict determinist or
Stirner is wrong, and Marx ' s attempt to translate his ideal of communism into a historical necessity is self-contradictory.
Lobkowicz ' s narrative concludes with this brief discussion of the
genesis of " historical materialism, " and we must await a more
thorough analysis of the concept in a subsequent volume . 86 As it
stands, Theory and Practice is clearly a major contribution to Marx
83 German Ideology,
p . 31.
84Lobkowicz, p . 422 . This objection to the dilemma of " revolutionary praxis"
is not, it should be noted, a criticism of Marx ' s theory about practice . Indeed,
there is a good deal of truth in Marx' s observation that because of the contingencies of one ' s situation, history, in the sense of " what men do," depends
upon the conscious, rational intentions of men, but this same contingency can
subvert their intentions and provide men with consequences quite antithetical to
what they sought . Thus, for example, there is nothing but an obvious empirical
truth in the observation that " circumstances make men just as much as men
make circumstances . " The German Ideology, p . 51 . Cf . Lobkowicz, pp . 415,
417, 426.
85 Lobkowicz, pp . 408-409, 426 .
212
research, and one hesitates indeed to offer even a mild disclaimer to

an intellectual edifice of such imposing significance . Nevertheless, a
few critical observations are demanded . A relatively minor point is
the question of what it takes to be a Left or Young Hegelian . At
one point, only Bauer is, " properly speaking, " a Left Hegelian and
yet, " between 1839 and 1843 they all [i .e., Bauer, Hess and Ruge]
were occupied with the same problem : what it meant to translate
absolute theory into practice ." 80 The only unique characteristic about
Bauer is that he managed to attain a university post 87 More serious
perhaps than the question of who is and who is not a Young Hegelian, is a metaphysical problem which, given the stated purpose
of the book, need not be raised but which, if raised by a metaphysician of Lobkowicz 's stature, should be thoroughly explored . An
earlier reviewer described Lobkowicz 's metaphysics as " Thomist" in
the perjorative sense of the term ; 8$ there is some justice in the identification, one suspects, but little in the innuendo . The problem is of
metaphysical significance because Marx and, more importantly,
Hegel denied the reality of human nature while, at least in the
example of Hegel, upholding the reality of metaphysics, specifically
a metaphysics of self-actualization which does not necessarily dissolve
into a mystical gnosticism and alchemy 8 9 A consideration of a
meontological metaphysics of selfhood might provide a more adequate analysis of what has been called " authentic existence " which,
in the context of alienation, may be the significance of the "human
potentiality " which alienation reveals. 90 A final comment concerns
Lobkowicz ' s criticism of Hannah Arendt ' s view of Marx . Arendt
argued that Marx ' s paradoxical view, that labor is both what constitutes man as man and that which will be abolished with the con-
BLobkowicz, p . 215.
s ''Lobkowicz, p . 239 . I might add, in passing, that a recent study by William
J. Brazil], The Young Hegelians (New Haven, 1970), places the religious
question as the central concern of the Young Hegelians . This principle of selection, despite its justification, has the unfortunate consequence of excluding
Marx, Engels and even Hess.
"George Lichtheim, New York Review of Books (11 April 1968), p . 27.
"Cf. Fackenheim, op. cit ., and also his study of Hegel, The Religious Dimension in Hegel' s Thought (Bloomington, Ind ., 1967).
so Cf . Lobkowicz, p . 315 . This is not to say that Lobkowicz's treatment of
alienation as developed by Marx is deficient but only to suggest that beneath
Marx' s deficient symbolism, logical inconsistency and so on there may be a
metaphysical and not just a psychological thesis .
213
summation of history, is the result of a failure to distinguish between

the truly different activities of labor (Arbeit) and work (Herstellen) . 91 Lobkowicz comments that Marx is not confused : "What
he wants to say is in fact quite simple : the labor of our body can
achieve so radical a transformation of man and his world that it
ceases to be a burden and becomes a full expression of man's freedom . ` Labor is man' s coming-to-be for himself within alienation or
as alienated man ' ; it transforms man ' s condition to the extent that
eventually man will no longer have to labor in order to satisfy his
needs . As far as I can see, Marx never intimated how this might
happen . But one has only to imagine that one day man will produce
machines which service and even reproduce themselves to acknowledge that this idea is far from being wildly Utopian . " 92 It is not
at all clear that Arendt 's objection and her argument are met by
Lobkowicz ' s observation : while machines can surely ease the pain
of labor, it is by no means clear that they can satisfy biological
needs . Moreover, Arendt' s understanding of the significance of
man 's world and its relationship to the stability of man ' s works
which constitute his world makes it more than dubious that the
world is a "burden," or that freedom could ever be the consequence
of a " world" no longer a " burden . " Indeed it may well be the
very threat of a " worldless " activity of painless labor, perhaps tending the machines that reproduce themselves, that Arendt finds disquieting . What is " wildly Utopian " is the notion " that eventually
man will no longer have to labor in order to satisfy his needs " because labor is precisely the activity which satisfies needs . Lobkowicz ' s
comments, and the readiness to blur the distinction between labor
and work, 93 are particularly surprising in the light of his own very
careful initial distinctions . 94
IV
Of the three books under review, Lobkowicz ' s is clearly the best.
He substantiates with sound philosophical and theological argument
the cruder, psychologically based opinions of Tucker . Moreover, he
91 H . Arendt. The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), pp . 104-105.

"Lobkowicz, p . 348 ; the quotation is from Marx ' s Early Writings, p . 203.
"Cf . Lobkowicz, pp . 333, 334, 338, 342.
94 Cf . Lobkowicz, pp . 3-15 .
214
hints, on the final page, that despite its dubious origins, there may be
some insight in Marx's idea of praxis . With the argument and analysis of Avineri before us, it would be difficult to think otherwise . But
this faces us with a new problem : How to account for the two
Marxes, the historian-social scientist and the gnostic prophet? We
can do no more than give a brief suggestion.
Beneath Marx's cure for the condition of his age may be detected
a genuine diagnostic insight . But the whole problem of understanding Marx lies in the gap between diagnosis and therapy and the
dialectic which spans it . A contrast with Platonic therapeia may be
instructive, for Plato, as Marx, found his social order perverse.
Plato 's diagnosis was that his fellow citizens loved the wrong things
or, what was the same thing, that they were ignorant " in the soul"
as to what they truly loved, namely the good . What is required then,
is a mestatrophe, a " conversion" whereby the entire soul is turned
around . Such is the task of the educative regimen, paideusis, spelled
out in Book VII of The Republic . Two things distinguish Platonic
" revolutionary " paideia from Marx ' s revolutionary praxis . The first
is that the philosopher is representative because he can " measure "
the goodness of the desires of the polis . He can do so because he
desires the highest good, because the god is the measure of the
philosopher ' s psyche. 96 The Platonic teaching suggests that the interlocutor, that is, Socrates, will first of all have ordered his own psyche
in conformity with the divine measure . The physician must heal himself before he is fit to " cure " a "sick" polls . The instrument for
therapeutic conversion is, of course, dialectic, rational discussion . In
contrast, Marx prevents rational discussion from ever arising. The
condition for even speaking about " man" is the acceptance of the
by no means obvious proposition that "man is directly a natural
being ." 96 We noted above, in connection with Avineri's exegesis
of Marx's notions of " nature," that there was a profound equivocation in his use of the word . Moreover, Marx explains that if man
were not directly a natural being he would owe his being to something else and therefore would not truly be anything at all . This is
true, of course, only if the premise is true . But Marx never defends
the premise . Moreover, in a context which is surely parallel to the
95 Theatetus, 152a ff ; Republic, 501b, 589d ; Laws, 716c ff.

9 "Early Writings, p . 206 .
215
origin of philosophical speculation on the arche of human being,

Marx explicitly refuses to answer questions and to undertake a
rational defense of his opinions. 97 Marx's refusal to argue is complemented by a lack of moderation . For Marx, man is his own "measure " which means there is no measure ; in plain words, Marx
refuses the conditio humana . This refusal leads to a second comment . The philosopher does not "know, " for as Socrates explained
to Phaedrus, only the god can be said to know . In contrast, man
may fairly be said to be a lover and not a professor of knowledge . 98
As an experiential corollary, the philosopher is also a lover of the
good. The contrast made by Marx with a philosophic understanding
of representative human existence has been pointed out often
enough . Marx 's Promethean "madness " is simply a corollary of the
lust to possess " actual knowledge" that he inherited from Hegel . But
since, in reality, the gods are still the gods and men are men, the
non-recognition of humanity and the speculative transfiguration of
men into gods can only become an additional source of irrationality
and disorder.
At the beginning of this review, we noted the existence of two
typical non-ideological interpretations of Marx . In the light of his
own badly deformed self-understanding, Marx ' s scientific diagnosis
may appear purely fortuitous . Yet, the pragmatic success of Marx 's
teaching, even if vulgarized into a mass creed, suggests that the
relationship may be more complex . Contemporary formulations of
the psychopathology of schizophrenia may be suggestive . Phenomenological accounts of schizoid existence reveal the coexistence of a
" true " and a " false, " an "imaginary " and a " real" self, 99 and something similar obtains in the existence of thinkers such as Hegel '
and Marx . A comprehensive analysis of Marx requires that the
" true" and the "real " elements of his writings, which are both genuine symptoms of bourgeois political disorder and genuine analyses
of the sources of bourgeois disorder, be carefully untangled from the
"Early Writings, pp . 165-167.

"Phaedrus, 278d.
99 The true-false distinction is from R . D . Laing, The Divided Self (Baltimore, 1966) ; the real-imaginary distinction is from J .-P. Sartre, L ' Imaginaire:
Psychologie phenomenologique de l'imagination (Paris, 1940).
'Such a study of Hegel recently appeared by Eric Voegelin, " Hegel-A
Study in Sorcery," Studium Generale, 25 (1971), 335-368 .
216
" false" and "imaginary" elements which, as the substance of a political movement, are so intimately linked to the bourgeois pathology
Marxism pretends to oppose . Such a treatment may expect modest
enough pragmatic consequences given present political realities ; perhaps it can contribute to a restoration of political science, which may
indeed be Plato ' s therapeia .
BARRY COOPER
York University

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RECENT STUDIES ON MARX

The Social & Political Thought of Karl Marx . By Shlomo Avineri.

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

RECENT STUDIES ON MARX

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ecumenical expansion of capitalism which, as Marx puts it in the

'Selected Works (New York, 1968), p . 39.

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RECENT STUDIES ON MARX

particularity of civil society, but by the universalization of man who

17 Werke, I, pp . 283, 231 ; Avineri, pp . 31-34.

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

des Staats might likely mean as a pragmatic eventuality, nor is there

any theoretical analysis of the symbolism, its derivation, or its real

19 Avineri, " Labor, Alienation and Social Classes, " p . 110.

RECENT STUDIES ON MARX

24Avineri, pp . 68, 71.

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contention that external reality may be given significance through

"Early Writings, pp . 206-07 ; Avineri, pp . 79-81 .

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The German Ideology, Ed . S . Ryezanska, (Moscow, 1964), pp . 39 if.

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

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Tucker says, is "understandable" and even "reasonable," but it is

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in "a methodical doubt, a suspension of commitment " as to what

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presentation, to say the least, lacks technical sophistication . First of

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"Tucker mentions H. Frankfort et al ., Before Philosophy and E. Cassirer,

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of modern politics in general and Marx 's speculation in the context

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

the best, but there is an important truth in what he says . Everybody

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Marx 's alienation is self-alienation indeed . 60 It is the alienation of

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

RECENT STUDIES ON MARX

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What remained as the unshakeable experiential ground for the

RECENT STUDIES ON MARX

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"See Lobkowicz, pp . 239-247.

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in reality, Marx says, the radical disjunction between "pre-history "

77 Cf . Early Writings, pp. 165-166. Lobkowicz ; pp . 359-372.

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This was surely an ingenious answer to Stirner, but it contains

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research, and one hesitates indeed to offer even a mild disclaimer to

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summation of history, is the result of a failure to distinguish between

91 H . Arendt. The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), pp . 104-105.

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95 Theatetus, 152a ff ; Republic, 501b, 589d ; Laws, 716c ff.

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origin of philosophical speculation on the arche of human being,

"Early Writings, pp . 165-167.

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