Fifteen Eighty Four

Karl Marx (1818–1883) began as a philosopher. But his subsequent relationship to philosophy, as his career developed, has been a subject of dispute. In my book, Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy, I offer a new interpretation of this relationship which fundamentally recasts Marx’s contribution to philosophy.

It is clear enough that Marx was fully invested in philosophy as his intellectual focus, and his career choice, early in his life. After an initial period studying law in Bonn, under pressure from his lawyer father, the young Marx moved to Berlin and transferred his intellectual affections to philosophy. His doctoral dissertation was a tour de force of philosophical scholarship, devoted to a detailed comparison of the atomistic philosophies of Democritus (a contemporary of Socrates) and Epicurus (a post-Aristotelian philosopher). But, having secured himself a position teaching philosophy back at Bonn, a repressive political wave swept across Germany, making it impossible for radicals such as himself to hold academic posts. Instead Marx became a journalist and, ultimately, a revolutionary concerned to get to grips with the workings of capitalism in order to overthrow it.

But what became of Marx’s early commitment to philosophy? It has been usual to read Marx’s development in one of two ways. One way has him bringing about an intellectual revolution that allowed him to move beyond the traditional philosophy he had done as a young man and into an entirely new and unprecedented realm of scientific enquiry. In the terminology of Louis Althusser, who pioneered this view, Marx performed an ‘epistemological rupture’, from philosophy to new-found science. According to another reading, Marx seeks to ‘leave’ philosophy, in order to engage in value-free science, but this attempt to leave is unsuccessful: Marx remains, despite his best intentions, trapped within philosophy. This reading is associated with the American philosopher Daniel Brudney.

Both these established readings have in common the idea that Marx was at first a philosopher, and then attempted (whether successfully or unsuccessfully) to move beyond, or away from, philosophy. In my book, I argue that Marx’s development must be understood in a different way. Marx, rather than seeking to move beyond philosophy, sought to actualize it. In other words, Marx’s later work is precisely concerned to show us what philosophy can be; he is practising philosophy as it has never been practised before. In other words, he is not a lapsed philosopher, but someone who is trying to bring philosophy into its own.

To understand Marx’s project in this way requires beginning from an appreciation of the conception of philosophy that Marx was working with. This he inherited from predecessors such as Hegel and, more remotely, Aristotle. For them, philosophy was not one discipline of enquiry to be ranked alongside others, with its own determinate subject matter. Instead, philosophy was rational enquiry as such, encompassing and giving rise to more specific enquiries that each have a delimited subject matter. To put it in more technical terms, philosophy is not a ‘special science’, as, for example, physics is. Physics is such a special science in virtue of having a determinate subject matter: nature. Philosophy has no such determinate subject matter. It is, ultimately, thinking activity itself.

The work of his great philosophical predecessor Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was highly formative for Marx. But Marx was far from an emulator of Hegel’s approach to philosophy. Instead, he took over Hegel’s fundamental conception of philosophy, according to which it was rational enquiry as such, directed at an unlimited object (or, what comes to the same, at no specific object), and sought to be resolutely true to it. In other words, what Marx was offering was a very fundamental critique of Hegel, a critique that began from taking Hegel utterly seriously on his own terms. The result was a rejection of Hegel’s philosophy as (ostensibly) ‘self-sufficient’ – a merely intellectual exercise in the generation of a self-closed circle of concepts. Such philosophy, for Marx, fell short of philosophy in its actuality, which turned out to be human thinking in action.

One important consequence of reading Marx in this way is that it allows us to see Capital, his unfinished masterpiece, not as turning away from philosophy, but as actualizing philosophy. That may seem surprising. Isn’t this text concerned with matters far removed from traditional philosophy? It certainly doesn’t seem to contain philosophical doctrines. But this, I argue in my book, is precisely what we should expect philosophy, in its actualization, to look like. Such philosophy does not attempt to be ‘self-sufficient’, an intellectual exercise unto itself. Instead Capital emerges as, I think, Marx intended it: an enormous, extended practical argument with the revolution as its conclusion. It manifests what Marx regarded as a great truth: that thought is, in the first instance, practical, restricting itself to theoretical claims as it goes, in order to secure the cognizance of the world that action requires. Capital restricts itself to the specific domain of the critique of political economy as it does the work of actualizing philosophy. But this does not mean that the critique of political economy and philosophy are somehow coextensive. Far from it. Here, in grappling with the nineteenth-century European society and the manner in which its life is skewed by capital, a self-restriction of thinking activity to the critique of political economy is to be expected. Once the revolution has been accomplished, the work of thinking activity (or philosophy in its actualization) will take on forms that can as yet only be indistinctly glimpsed. What will not change is the character of human thinking activity (or philosophy in its actualization) as self-limiting itself into a host of distinct enquiries, in its pursuit of the task of human life.