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The Dialectics of the Historical and Logical in Hegel and Marx

This essay is an exploration of Marx’s dialectical logic, in particular the question of the
relationship between the historical and logical. This little-discussed aspect, like much else in
Marx, is rooted in Hegel. But just as a tree cannot be reduced to its roots, so Marx’s view of the
historical and the logical cannot be reduced to that of Hegel’s. There is a qualitative break
between the two, and the logic of both does not coincide. A proper comprehension of them
requires that they be grasped in their mutual exclusivity and interconnection. The essence of the
following study concerns the question of scientific cognition as pioneered by Hegel and further
developed by Marx.
Hegel
Hegel, in discussing the writing of history, once observed that the latter seemed “at first
to be a succession of chance events, in which each fact stands isolated by itself, which has Time
alone as a connecting-link.”1 This was due not merely to the superficial aspect of surface
appearances, but also because of what Hegel termed the “metaphysics of Time.”2 The latter is
grounded in his metaphysics of nature, which, in turn, is premised on his dialectical logic.3 In
Hegel’s system, the philosophy of nature follows the logic. As Hegel wrote, “Nature has yielded
itself as the Idea in the form of otherness. Since the Idea is therefore the negative of itself, or
external to itself, nature is not merely external relative to this Idea…but is embodied as nature, is
the determination of externality.”4 That is to say, as nature is the other of the Idea, its basic
aspect is externality. Indeed, logic, as the beginning, is the Idea in its immediate unity and
subsists on its own.5 Therefore nature, as a sublation of the latter, is the sphere of mediation.
The initial category of nature is space. In Hegel’s words the “primary or immediate
determination of nature is the abstract universality of its self-externality, its unmediated
indifference, i.e. space.”6 As such space is “the form of immediate externality.”7 Following space
comes time, as nature’s second determination. It likewise is marked by externality, for time is
“the negative unity of self-externality” and “its differences are therefore determined as being
simply momentary; in that they immediately sublate themselves in their externality however,

1
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1: Greek Philosophy to Plato,
trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 6.
2
Ibid., 32.
3
“Speculative logic contains the former logic and metaphysics, preserves the same forms of thought, the same laws
and objects, but at the same time in doing so it develops them further and transforms them with the help of
additional categories.” Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic
Outline, Part I: Science of Logic, trans. and eds. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 37.
4
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Volume I, ed. and tran. M.J. Petry (London: George Allen & Unwin
Ltd., 1970), 205.
5
“Thus what constitute the method are the determinations of the Notion itself and their relations, which we have
now to consider in their significance as determinations of the method. In doing so we must first begin with the
beginning. Of the beginning we have already spoken at the beginning of the Logic itself…Because it is the
beginning, its content is an immediate, but an immediate that has the significance and form of abstract universality.”
G.W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, tran. A.V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 827.
6
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 223.
7
Ibid., 223.

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they are self-external.”8 Nature, then, is the realm of externality and therefore space and time, as
its determinations, likewise have the same character.9 More specifically, space is immediate
externality and time is mediated externality, or self-externality.10
As noted above, because nature follows the logic, it is mediated. In this state the
“determinations are only relational, not yet as reflected strictly within themselves.”11 Categories
here do not subsist on their own, but are related to another outside of it, and this is precisely
externality. This latter aspect, being the negative, mediated relation also includes contingency for
the “contingent is in general such as has the ground of its being not in itself but in another.”12
Hence, all that which is marked by externality is contingent, or accidental. For Hegel this is the
basic structural reason why history appears random. History is contingent because it is external,
and as it unfolds in time and space it presents an external succession within these dimensions.13
Yet Hegel also argued that “history represents, not merely the external, accidental, events
contained within it,” but, further, there was an “essential connection in which the individual
events have their place and relation to an end or aim, and in this way obtain significance.”14 As
he stated more explicitly elsewhere: “The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the
contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the
World; that the history of the world therefore, presents us with a rational process.”15 The goal of
philosophy, of science, is to cognise this movement for “a collection of facts constitutes no
science.”16 What we see on the surface appears chaotic and full of chance. But, Hegel argued,
underlying all this is some sort of logical order, and the pursuit of this was the aim of his method
of dialectical logic.
Hegel exhibited this method throughout his work and it is the soul of his entire system.17
It is set forth in general in the preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit and in detail in his Science

8
Ibid., 229-230.
9
“But consciousness really implies that for myself, I am object to myself. In forming this absolute division between
what is mine and myself, Mind constitutes its existence and establishes itself as external to itself. It postulates itself
in the externality which is just the universal and the distinctive form of existence in Nature. But one of the forms of
externality is Time, and this form requires to be farther examined both in the Philosophy of Nature and the finite
Mind.” Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 32.
10
“The present, future, and past, the dimensions of time, constitute the becoming of externality as such.” Ibid., 233.
11
G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the
Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.,
1991), 175.
12
Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 216.
13
“Space is the connection of the quiescent asunderness and side-by-sideness of things; Time is the connection of
their vanishing or alteration.” G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic, tran. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Basil
Blackwood Ltd., 1986), 66.
14
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 6.
15
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tran. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.,
1956), 9.
16
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 31.
17
“The scientific cognition of truth is what I have laboured upon, and still do labour upon always, in all of my
philosophical endeavours. This is the hardest road to travel, but it is the only one that can be of interest and value for
the spirit, once the spirit embarks upon the way of thought, without tumbling into vanity upon that road, but
maintaining the will and the courage for the truth. It soon finds that only method can tie thought down, lead it to the
matter, and maintain it there.” Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 4-5.

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of Logic. There the basic principles are most clearly elucidated. In Hegel’s view, if the goal of
science is to grasp the logical necessity amid contingency, then the method of science cannot be
something separate from the inner logic. As he wrote:
this method is not something distinct from its subject matter and content – for it is the
content in itself, the dialectic which it possesses within itself, which moves the subject
matter forward. It is clear that no expositions can be accepted as scientifically valid that
do not follow the progression of this method and are not in tune with its simple rhythm,
for it is the course of the fact itself.18
What Hegel was emphasising, was that to truly comprehend an object, event, process, etc.,
whatever the subject matter under study, the observer must not read their own opinions and
sentiments into it. Thus this method “does not behave like external reflection but takes the
determinate element from its own subject matter, since it is itself that subject matter’s immanent
principle and soul…it should consider things in and for themselves…solely the things
themselves and bring before consciousness what is immanent in them.”19 And this is the meaning
of Hegel’s remark that that “Truth is its own self-movement,” for the only correct approach to
grasping the truth is to follow the imminent logic.20
The result of this is a dual conception of logic viz. as both the internal course of a subject
matter and as the comprehension of the latter. This is not an implicit assumption of Hegel’s
stand, for he quite explicitly wrote that “logical necessity…is the rational element and the
rhythm of the organic whole; it is as much knowledge of the content.”21 This “organic whole” is
not simply the subject in toto. For the “truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the
essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development.”22 More
specifically, the subject under study is “moving concrete totality,” which includes “its genesis,
development, and passing away.”23 The movement of the whole is thus the movement of logic.
Hence it is no surprise that Hegel argued that “the method of this movement” is “the method of
science,” and that “its genuine exposition belongs to logic, or is instead even logic itself, for the
method is nothing but the structure of the whole in its pure essentiality.”24 Logic, then, is the
cognition of the totality in its own self-development.
The following is one of Hegel’s best formulations on the matter: “Science sets forth this
formative process in all its detail and necessity, exposing the mature configuration of everything

18
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, tran. and ed. George Di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 33.
19
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, 830.
20
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tran. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 28.
21
Ibid., 34.
22
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tran. J.B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967), 81.
23
Jason Devine, “Dialectical logic in Plato’s ‘Parmenides’, Hegel’s ‘Logic’ and Marx’s ‘Critique of Political
Economy’,” accessed 23 April 2020, http://links.org.au/dialectical-logic-plato-parmenides-hegel-marx-critique-
political-economy. The “subject matter is not exhausted in its aims; rather, it is exhaustively treated when it is
worked out. Nor is the result which is reached the actual whole itself; rather, the whole is the result together with the
way the result comes to be.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, tran. and ed. Terry
Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5.
24
Ibid., 29.

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which has already been reduced to a moment.”25 This is a compact summary and lays bare the
crux of the matter. That is, what should be quite obvious is that Hegel’s dialectic emphasises a
direct relationship between logic and necessity, to the point that both are essentially
synonymous. So that whether we say there is a logical connection between logic and necessity,
or that there is a necessary connection between necessity and logic, both would amount to the
same thing. One cannot be conceived without the other. In the words of Kant: “truth rests on
universal and necessary laws as its criteria.”26
This linkage goes back to Aristotle, the founder of formal logic. In his Analytica Priora
he defined the syllogism as “discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than
what is stated follows of necessity from their being so. I mean by the last phrase that they
produce the consequence, and by this, that no further term is required from without in order to
make the consequence necessary.”27 Thus, if certain premises are postulated, then a certain
conclusion necessarily follows. This can be seen even more clearly in Stoic logic. The syllogism
of the Stoics was propositional and this is one of the basic forms they developed: “If it is day, it
is light. It is day. Therefore it is light,” or “If the first, the second. But the first. Therefore, the
second.”28 We can see, then, that a parallel was being drawn between causal determination and
valid inference; with the latter being the necessary condition for human reason to comprehend
the former.
The implication of Hegel’s arguments is that logic is the essential premise of all
sciences.29 Yet he was not the progenitor of this view and, again, we must go back to Aristotle.
Gajo Petrović has noted that the “basic concepts of Aristotle’s logic have their roots in
metaphysics,” in that “his logic grew out of his metaphysics.”30 Petrović was correct, as Aristotle
defined philosophy as the “science…of primary causes.”31 This was “a science higher than
natural science…a science whose subject matter is universal and which is exclusively concerned
with primary substance.”32 The “primary substance” is the basis of all existence, and hence the
study of it is the purview of what Aristotle termed the “First Philosophy” viz. the first science
which comes before all others. This sphere of knowledge, therefore, “should be able to give the

25
Hegel, Phenomenology, tran. Miller, 17.
26
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing,
1950), 124.
27
Aristotle, “Analytica Priora,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: The Modern
Library, 2001), 66.
28
Diogenes Laertius, “Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers,” in Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory
Readings, 2nd ed., trans. Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 120-121.
29
“However, knowledge of the absolutely Absolute – for those sciences are to come to know their special contents
equally in their truth, i.e., in their absoluteness – is only possible through knowledge of a totality forming in its
stages a system. And those sciences are its stages. Aversion to a system makes one think of a statue of a god who is
supposed to have no form. Unsystematic philosophy is accidental, fragmentary thinking, and its direct consequence
is a rigid attitude to true content.” G.W.F. Hegel, “Hegel to Niethammer, Nuremberg, October 23, 1812,” in G.W.F.
Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),
279.
30
Gajo Petrović, Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century: A Yugoslav Philosopher Reconsiders Karl Marx’s Writings
(New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 219.
31
Aristotle, The Metaphysics, tran. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 79.
32
Ibid., 87.

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securest principles…of everything.”33 For Aristotle this included the examination of “the
principles of logic.”34 Hence we see that metaphysics, or ontology, and logic were tightly
connected, or rather united.35 Indeed, the first principle, “the most secure of all,” of metaphysics
and of logic was that which was later referred to as the law of non-contradiction.36 In claiming
that there existed basic principles which govern everything, Aristotle was inherently arguing for
the existence of universal laws. Reality, in its basic structure, has a regularity and the initial step
to grasping this is precisely logic.
Kant, the initiator of German Idealism, likewise stressed the importance of logic for
science in very explicit terms. In his view “Logic” was first and foremost “the science that
contains the formal rules and principles of thought.”37 Humans think without the direct study of
the latter, but some conscious reflection on them is required for the development of scientific
thought. Logic is therefore “a propaedeutic to all the sciences.”38 While it is true that logical
thinking alone cannot produce new knowledge, it is still a necessary condition and so
“everything else stands under it. It opens the way to all other sciences.”39 Certainly, in a
formulation that could not possibly be stated any stronger, Kant asserted that all “sciences are the
praxis of logic, however, because without logic nothing can go forward.”40 Yet Kant’s view of
metaphysics differed from Aristotle. The former held that metaphysics had not yet been
established as a science and his goal was, accordingly, to set forth the principles for this. He
intended to salvage metaphysics but, in doing so, he limited its scope compared to Aristotle. This
was Kant’s transcendental logic, his metaphysics, which he developed out of formal logic.41
Hegel agreed with Aristotle and Kant that a connection between logic and metaphysics
existed and was important; but, in his perspective, their conceptions on this question were too
limited. He also felt that logic, as it then stood, was in a sorry state.42 Thus Hegel sought to carry
33
Ibid., 87.
34
Ibid., 87.
35
“According to my view, metaphysics in any case falls entirely within logic. Here I can cite Kant as my precedent
and authority. His critique reduces metaphysics as it has existed until now to a consideration of the understanding
and reason. Logic can thus in the Kantian sense be understood so that, beyond the usual content of so-called general
logic, what he calls transcendental logic is bound up with it and set out prior to it. In point of content I mean the
doctrine of categories, or reflective concepts, and then of the concepts of reason: analytic and dialectic. These
objective thought forms constitute an independent content [corresponding to] the role of the Aristotelian Categories
[organon de categoriis] or the former ontology. Further, they are independent of one’s metaphysical system. They
occur in transcendental idealism as much as in dogmatism. The latter calls them determinations of being [Entium],
while the former calls them determinations of the understanding. My objective logic will, I hope, purify this science
once again, expositing it in its true worth, but until it is better known those Kantian distinctions already contain a
makeshift or rough version of it.” G.W.F. Hegel, “Hegel to Niethammer, Nuremberg, October 23, 1812,” 277.
36
Ibid., 88.
37
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, tran. and ed. J. Michael Young (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1992) 438.
38
Ibid., 432.
39
Ibid., 14.
40
Ibid., 255.
41
Kant, Prolegomena, pg. 114; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Vasilis Politis (London: Everyman,
1993), 72-73, 85.
42
“Nobody knows anymore what to do with this old logic. One drags it around like some old heirloom only because
a substitute, the need of which is generally felt, is not yet available.” G.W.F. Hegel, “Hegel to Niethammer,
Bamberg, May 20, 1808,” in Hegel: The Letters, 175.

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out a systematic “reconstruction of logic,” which would also address the weakened condition of
metaphysics that Kant had left it in.43 What was implicit and abstract with the two previous
thinkers, Hegel would make explicit and concrete. Thus his project would fuse logic and
metaphysics more tightly than ever before and extend the resulting unified method to encompass
all existence. As Clark Butler observed, “What Hegel…called the ‘new logic’ becomes the
‘metaphysical or ontological logic’…It is really the most ancient of all logics, since it
commences with pre-Socratic cosmology, i.e., with the logos of the objective world.”44 More
specifically this was the logos of Heraclitus, the dialectical “inner logic to reality.”45
The basic “principle” of this logic is “the dialectic itself.”46 It includes the self-motion of
the whole, of the totality, although this is still too general and must be further concretised. More
specifically it is the “flux of opposites,” or what Hegel termed “the identity of being and non-
being.”47 This is contradiction viz. the continual movement of opposites into each other.48 Hegel
famously gave a vivid example of what this meant:
The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the
former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up
in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it
instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one
another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them
moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is
as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the
whole.49
Here we see the method of Hegel’s dialectic logic. The immediate existence of the bud is
supplanted or negated by the blossom, it is “refuted.” The bud thus becomes mediated by its
opposite, by what it is not; or, as Hegel stated elsewhere, “when the germ opens up; this
unclosing should be regarded as the judgment of the plant.”50 While Hegel meant that the new
phase disproves the previous one, there was a deeper meaning at play. A logical judgement, or
proposition is, of course, the distinguishing between a subject and predicate viz. the relation is
“one of an equalization of both terms; both are treated as identical, but this identity rests upon

43
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, 25-27.
44
Clark Butler, “Speculative Logic in the Gymnasium,” in Hegel: The Letters, 262.
45
Jason Devine, “On fire: A dialectical heritage,” accessed 25 April 2020, http://links.org.au/on-fire-dialectical-
heritage-heraclitus-marx-materialism. As Hegel openly declared: “There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I
have not adopted in my Logic.” See, Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 279.
46
Ibid., 279.
47
Devine, “On fire,” accessed 25 April 2020, http://links.org.au/on-fire-dialectical-heritage-heraclitus-marx-
materialism.
48
“The dialectical moment is the self-sublation of these finite determinations on their own part, and their passing
into their opposites.” Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 128.
49
Hegel, Phenomenology, tran. Miller, 2.
50
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 245.

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their being distinguished.”51 As Hegel stated, “everything is a judgment.”52 Hence the original
unity, the immediate identity, falls into diremption. But just as the division is premised on unity
and vice versa, so despite the falsity of the previous stage, the truth of the new stage necessarily
presumes the former. As such the older form is sublated by the new one, and it itself will
likewise be shown to be one-sided, that is abstract, and ultimately untrue; hence replaced by yet
another form, and so on.53 The earlier, lower stages are subordinated to the later, higher ones,
and the whole process is subordinated to the concrete whole as the result. The movement here,
then, is from the simple to the complex, the abstract to the concrete, and therefore the truth of the
plant is contained precisely in the totality of its moments, in the organic movement of its
formation. Taken as a series of judgments, the whole plant is itself a syllogism; again Hegel:
“Everything is a syllogism.”54
The above is an example of Hegel’s statement that “the truth is concrete; that is, while it
gives a bond and principle of unity, it also possesses an internal source of development. Truth,
then, is only possible as a universe or totality of thought.”55 The rhythm of the whole, the reason
for the movement from the abstract to the concrete, is contradiction. This is precisely why Hegel

51
Devine, “Dialectical logic,” accessed 26 April 2020, http://links.org.au/dialectical-logic-plato-parmenides-hegel-
marx-critique-political-economy. What Hegel termed the “forms of thought” includes categories, judgments, and
syllogisms and these “are, in the first instance, displayed and stored in human language.” See, Hegel, Hegel’s
Science of Logic, 31. All expressions of human thought in language take place in these forms, from the most
theoretical to the more mundane. For example, the rose is red, or all men are mortal. In this Marx and Engels
followed Hegel: “Language is the immediate actuality of thought.” See, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The
German Ideology: Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer
and Stirner, and of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 472,
and “Language is as old as consciousness, language is actual, practical consciousness.” See, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, “Rough Notes, formerly known as ‘I. Feuerbach,’ drawn from ‘the German ideology’ manuscripts
by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Joseph Weydemeyer,” in Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts
Presentation and Analysis of the ‘Feuerbach chapter’,” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 75.
52
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 246.
53
“To sublate, and the sublated (that which exists ideally as a moment), constitute one of the most important notions
in philosophy. It is a fundamental determination which repeatedly occurs throughout the whole of philosophy…‘To
sublate’ has a twofold meaning in the language: on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it
also means to cause to cease, to put an end to. Even ‘to preserve’ includes a negative element, namely, that
something is removed from its influences, in order to preserve it. Thus what is sublated is at the same time
preserved; it has only lost its immediacy but is not on that account annihilated.” Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic,
106-107.
54
Ibid., 257; “This conceptual whole moves from the abstract to the concrete and encompasses the flow of opposites
into each other…these categories, these notions, are not presented on their own viz. as bare words with no syntax.
Rather, they are united and move through a vast linguistic structure….though a diversity of judgements, and
syllogisms which move through opposition i.e. the dialectic….This is precisely the concrete whole…judgements, are
the necessary form in which the categories of reason appear. However, because the judgement, as the equation of
subject and predicate, highlights unity over division, it is unable to express what Hegel called the speculative
truth…In order to remedy this, recourse must be had to counter propositions and judgements, but this merely
replicates the same problem of abstract one-sidedness. To truly address this insufficiency the opposing sides must be
sublated into a syllogism. Despite this, the progression cannot end and must continue in order to overcome the
eventual one-sidedness of any specific syllogism.” Devine, “Dialectical logic,” accessed 26 April 2020, http://links.
org.au/dialectical-logic-plato-parmenides-hegel-marx-critique-political-economy.
55
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), tran.
William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 19-20.

7
argued that “Contradiction is the rule of the true; non-contradiction is the rule of the false.”56
And whereas logic began with Heraclitus’ embryonic employment of this principle, it reached its
full conscious development in Hegel’s system as the culmination of philosophy: “To know
opposition in unity, and unity in opposition - this is absolute knowledge; and science is the
knowledge of this unity in its whole development by means of itself.”57 It is of the utmost
importance to note that as the essence of dialectic is motion, it cannot be limited simply to
contradiction, to the movement from immediate to mediate, or even to totality. The dialectic
includes all this and more, as it must be understood to be constantly unfolding and producing
new forms. The definition of the dialectic, therefore, must be continually deepened. One could
say that the dialectic is the whole architecture of relations, but such imagery is arguably far too
static and sensuous.
Seeing as this dialectic is the very nature of reality, we should not be surprised to find
that Hegel constantly referred to examples of it in the natural, social, and intellectual realms.58
He similarly drew parallels between these different spheres. In all of this Hegel had frequent
recourse to his favourite analogy of the plant. Thus, for example, he stated the following in
almost exact terms as those quoted above:
The development of the tree is the negation of the germ, and the blossom that of the
leaves, in so far as that they show that these do not form the highest and truest existence
of the tree. Last of all, the blossom finds its negation in the fruit. Yet none of them can
come into actual existence excepting as preceded by all the earlier stages.59
Hegel likely used this image constantly because it was one of the easiest ways to express the
organic movement of the dialectic. However, his more essential point was to emphasise that this
“same contradiction appears in all development.”60 This is why, in both examples, Hegel made
an analogy to the history of philosophy. As he wrote in the preface to the Phenomenology of
Spirit:
The more conventional opinion gets fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more
it tends to expect a given philosophical system to be either accepted or contradicted; and
hence it finds only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the diversity of
philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple
disagreements.61

56
G.W.F. Hegel, “Philosophical Dissertation on the Orbits of the Planets and the Habilitation Theses,” in
Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 171.
57
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3: Medieval and Modern
Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 551.
58
“Everything around us can be regarded an example of dialectic. For we know that, instead of being fixed and
ultimate, everything finite is alterable and perishable, and this is nothing but the dialectic of the finite, through which
the latter, being implicitly the other of itself, is driven beyond what it immediately is and overturns into its
opposite.” Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 130.
59
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, 37-38.
60
Ibid., 37.
61
Hegel, Phenomenology, tran. Miller, 2.

8
According to Hegel, the history of philosophy is the same as the life of the plant. Just as over the
course of the latter each form is superseded, so the successively appearing philosophical systems
negate each other. All hold sway for a time, being an expression of truth, but eventually each is
revealed to be incorrect and gives way to a new, higher philosophy that is truer. Like the plant,
the different systems are sublated and their basic insight is taken up to serve as a premise in the
next phase. That is, they do not merely contradict each other; rather, it is exactly in their
contradictory transitions, all becoming moments in the total process, that they are necessarily
united as a long march towards the truth. Thus, the history of philosophy, and hence logic, has its
own logic which itself is dialectical.
Hegel argued that a number of considerations were essential for the proper, scientific
cognition of history in general, and the history of philosophy in particular. First he asserted that
in the study of “Philosophy, the less deserts and merits are accorded to the particular individual,
the better is the history; and the more it deals with thought as free, with the universal character of
man as man, the more this thought, which is devoid of special characteristic, is itself shown to be
the producing subject.”62 If the history of philosophy has its own inherent dialectical logic, then
the question of individuals is not the essence of the matter. Yet this stance did not imply a
reduction of human agency, as if this history moved itself. As Hegel pointed out, the “real
producing subject” is the thought of humanity viz. “the universal character of man as man.” It is
conscious human labour, without regard to distinctions of culture, time, or place, which is the
essence of humanity.
Nevertheless, this fundamental fact did not appear immediately but was, rather, the
historical product of a long process. For we “are what we are through history” and the
“possession of self-conscious reason,” that which makes us human and “belongs to us of the
present world, did not arise suddenly, nor did it grow only from the soil of the present,” but
“must be regarded as previously present, as an inheritance, and as the result of labour – the
labour of all past generations of men.”63 It is significant that Hegel stated “all past generations,”
because this further emphasises that the subject of history is not this or that great hero, but
humanity as a whole. We humans have created ourselves over an extended temporal arc, and so
we are what we are through our own collective labour. As a result, it is precisely our own self-
creation, as ability and fact, which constitutes our spirit.
In light of this we might, then, say that humans make their own history, but Hegel would
hasten to add that they do so under conditions not of their own choosing, since the totality of
human life is the product of multiple past labours:
Just as the arts of outward life, the accumulated skill and invention, the customs and
arrangements of social and political life, are the result of the thought, care, and needs, of
the want and the misery, of the ingenuity, the plans and achievements of those who
preceded us in history, so, likewise, in science, and specially in Philosophy, do we owe
what we are to the tradition which, as Herder has put it, like a holy chain, runs through all

62
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, 1-2.
63
Ibid., 2.

9
that was transient, and has therefore passed away. Thus has been preserved and
transmitted to us what antiquity produced.64
While every new generation finds its conditions of life, this human tradition, already in
existence, this given fact does not remain a mere dead weight upon them. As Hegel noted, this
“tradition is no motionless statue, but is alive, and swells like a mighty river, which increases in
size the further it advances from its source.”65 The reason for this already flows from the above
viz. “the universal Mind,” the “world-spirit” i.e. humanity “does not remain stationary” and “this
follows from its very nature, for its activity, is its life.”66 In other words, to be human is to
engage in conscious activity as part of a collective and this “presupposes a material already
present, on which it acts, and which it does not merely augment by the addition of new matter,
but completely fashions and transforms.”67 Certainly, the very course of history has shown that
humans have regularly taken up and revolutionised their conditions and hence themselves. We
therefore see a dialectic between continuity and change, between the preservation of a previous
tradition and its alternation, and this is one aspect to the logic of human history. Ergo, it is the
conscious labour of humanity which has given history its coherence.
Humanity is the subject-object and therefore being human is not a condition which is
passively inherited but is rather the fruit of a practical struggle. Humanity was not born, it made
itself over time. As Hegel argued, to “receive this inheritance is also to enter upon its use,” viz.
our previous cultural developments are only gained through a process of active assimilation, and
in this way the tradition “constitutes the soul of each successive generation, the intellectual
substance of the time.”68 This also holds for the individual, because just as each new generation
finds a pre-existing cultural complex, so does the former. Thus this educational process is
repeated on the level of each single human in the process of their becoming: “The single
individual must also pass through the formative stages of universal Spirit so far as their content is
concerned, but as shapes which Spirit has already left behind, as stages on a way that has been
made level with toil.”69 No human is born, but instead it is formed only by struggling to master
and transform the already established cultural inheritance.70
The life of humanity is therefore pre-eminently historical, educational, and active: our
entire history, as an extended labour of self-creation, is premised on a struggle for knowledge.71
As such Hegel emphasised that this was the basis for “the fact that Philosophy can only arise in
connection with previous Philosophy, from which of necessity it has arisen.”72 New

64
Ibid., 2.
65
Ibid., 2-3.
66
Ibid., 3.
67
Ibid., 3.
68
Ibid., 3.
69
Hegel, Phenomenology, tran. Miller, 16.
70
“This is the function of our own and of every age: to grasp the knowledge which is already existing, to make it our
own, and in so doing to develop it still further and to raise it to a higher level. In thus appropriating it to ourselves
we make it into something different from what it was before.” Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3.
71
“The course of history does not show us the Becoming of things foreign to us, but the Becoming of ourselves and
of our own knowledge.” Ibid., 4.
72
Ibid., 3-4.

10
developments in science and art do happen, but they are not conjured out of thin air; they are
necessarily achieved on the basis of previous labour. We can only agree with Hegel’s remark in
regards to the development of logic, that “the need to occupy oneself with pure thought
presupposes that the human spirit must already have travelled a long road.”73 The history of
philosophy aims, above all, to comprehend the truth, or logic, of this necessary process.
We are here presented with a contradiction. All history has a necessary development, a
logic, and still it is the realm of contingency. It is exactly the purpose of philosophy, of science,
to reveal the necessity of a seemingly accidental process. For “philosophy is not meant to be a
narration of happenings but a cognition of what is true in them, and further, on the basis of this
cognition, to comprehend that which, in the narrative, appears as a mere happening.”74 While one
may consider this a step towards violating Hegel’s admonition not to read into the object what is
not there viz. seeking for necessity, reflection on the historical record shows otherwise. This is
especially true in regards to the history of philosophy, because it “represents, not merely the
external, accidental, events contained within it, but it shows how the content, or that which
appears to belong to mere history, really belongs to the science of Philosophy. The history of
Philosophy is itself scientific, and thus essentially becomes the science of Philosophy.”75 History
must develop into science.
On this basis Hegel therefore argued that the “same development of thinking that is
presented in the history of philosophy is presented in philosophy itself.”76 This echoed his
striking assertion that “the sequence in the systems of Philosophy in History is similar to the
sequence in the logical deduction of the Notion - determinations in the Idea.”77 His point was
that there is a coincidence in the progression of the history of philosophy and the structure of
philosophy itself; and more specifically between his History of Philosophy and his Logic.
However, this correlation does not hold in each particular detail, but only overall, in general.78
As he argued, it was the function of the “history of philosophy to show more precisely the extent
to which the unfolding of its content coincides with the dialectical unfolding of the pure logical
Idea on the one hand, and deviates from it on the other.”79 Certainly, if they exactly conformed to
each other this would be a sheer identity, an empty unity, and consequently not concrete or true.
Since history and logic diverged and yet coincided, that meant there were two ways that
this progressive development could happen:
That is to say, the progression of the various stages in the advance of Thought may occur
with the consciousness of necessity, in which case each in succession deduces itself, and
this form and this determination can alone emerge. Or else it may come about without

73
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, 34.
74
Ibid., 588. “Philosophy is the objective science of truth, it is science of necessity, conceiving knowledge, and
neither opinion nor the spinning out of opinions.” Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, 12.
75
Ibid., 6.
76
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 38.
77
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, 30.
78
“What is the first in science had of necessity to show itself to be the first historically. And we must regard the one
or the being of the Eleatics as the first instance of knowledge by thought.” Hegel, The Science of Logic, 65.
79
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 138.

11
this consciousness as does a natural and apparently accidental process, so that while
inwardly, indeed, the Notion brings about its result consistently, this consistency is not
made manifest. This is so in nature; in the various stages of the development of twigs,
leaves, blossom and fruit, each proceeds for itself, but the inward Idea is the directing and
determining force which governs the progression.80
The outward is the accidental, external progression in space and time, but inner necessity is the
logic of the latter. Since there are these two forms or processes, there subsequently are two
manners of presenting them. The first is the logical approach, “which represents the deduction of
the forms, the necessity thought out and recognized, of the determinations,” and this “is the
business of Philosophy…in the main, the business of logical Philosophy.”81 The other method is
the historical and this “represents the part played by the history of Philosophy, shows the
different Stages and moments in development in time, in manner of occurrence, in particular
places, in particular people or political circumstances, the complications arising thus, and, in
short, it shows us the empirical form.”82 Hegel distinguished the historical and logical sequences
and also argued that they were similar viz. that they harmonised in some manner. Their dialectic
intersects with that of contingency and necessity, and expresses the basic principle of dialectical
contradiction: unity in diversity and diversity in unity.
The historical and the logical are inextricably bound, each assuming the other, and
therefore “the study of the history of Philosophy is the study of Philosophy itself, for, indeed, it
can be nothing else.”83 Philosophy, like every other facet of existence, is a developing system
and so the only way to understand it is in that form: “The true shape in which truth exists can
only be the scientific system of such truth.”84 As we have seen, the goal of science is the
cognition of the truth; that is, the comprehension of the logical necessity underlying the
systematic development of some object of study. In other words, science, above all logic, aims at
grasping the phenomenon’s law or laws of motion, and this is its dialectic. We have already seen
this movement in regard to the plant and we will see this rhythm repeated below.
According to Hegel, the history of philosophy, “as concrete in itself, and self-developing,
is an organic system and a totality which contains a multitude of stages and of moments in
development,” and thus “every philosophy has been and still is necessary…none have passed
away, but all are affirmatively contained as elements in a whole.”85 Each phase of philosophy
comes forth as a whole unto itself, only to be found wanting. It is then overcome and in being
sublated is included in the forward march. This is repeated with the continual inclusion of
previous stages as moments in the forming concrete totality. As this occurs the philosophical
system is reduced to a principle, its guiding principle.86 Therefore Hegel argued that these
80
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, 29.
81
Ibid., 29.
82
Ibid., 29-30.
83
Ibid., 30.
84
Hegel, Phenomenology, tran. Miller, 3.
85
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, 27, 37.
86
A “so-called basic proposition or principle of philosophy, if true, is also false, just because it is only a principle. It
is, therefore, easy to refute it. The refutation consists in pointing out its defect; and it is defective because it is only
the universal or principle, is only the beginning…The genuinely positive exposition of the beginning is thus also,

12
“principles are retained, the most recent philosophy being the result of all preceding, and hence
no philosophy has ever been refuted. What has been refuted is not the principle of this
philosophy, but merely the fact that this principle should be considered final and absolute in
character.”87 These principles become the categories of the later developing philosophical
systems.88
In this movement “that which first commences is implicit, immediate, abstract, general –
it is what has not yet advanced; the more concrete and richer comes later, and the first is poorer
in determinations.”89 That is to say, the first philosophies are the most abstract and simple, and
the later ones are the most concrete and complex. This history is hence a motion from the
abstract to the concrete which functions by means of the sublation of opposites viz. it “is a
progression impelled by an inherent necessity…and the impelling force is the inner dialectic of
the forms.”90 Again, philosophy, logic, science is about revealing the inner necessity in history.
This is its dialectic, and is itself the method of movement, dialectical logic. This is what is
necessary in all movement, for example the development of thought. But it also holds for other
processes, such as the logic of capital accumulation. Dialectical logic, then, sets out the organic
formation of the concrete whole minus the accidental features of history. In terms of the history
of philosophy, Hegel’s system, as the latest, is the most concrete of all.
When we come to other areas of life, however, the relationship between the historical and
logical does not coincide so closely. For example, in Hegel’s discussion of the matter in the
Philosophy of Right, we find the question far messier. There he began by repeating the essentials
of his dialectical method: “The Idea must continually determine itself further within itself, for it
is initially no more than an abstract concept. But this initial abstract concept is never abandoned.
On the contrary, it merely becomes continually richer in itself, so that the last determination is
also the richest.”91 Here it is crucial to emphasise that the concrete is not formed by the addition
of multiple abstractions. Rather, the initial abstraction unfolds out of itself all further
determinations viz. the first concept is merely the totality in its immediate unity, only implicitly.
Thus “the concept remains the soul which holds everything together and which arrives at its own
differentiation only through an immanent process.”92 The concept is hence self-determining and

conversely, just as much a negative attitude towards it, viz. towards its initially one-sided form of being immediate
or purpose. It can therefore be taken equally well as a refutation of the principle that constitutes the basis of the
system, but it is more correct to regard it as a demonstration that the basis or principle of the system is, in fact, only
its beginning.” Hegel, Phenomenology, tran. Miller, 13-14; “For the beginning, precisely because it is the beginning,
is imperfect…The philosopher himself will let the objection arise for the reader at its own time and necessary place.
His entire philosophy itself is nothing but a struggle against the beginning, a refutation and annihilation of his
starting point.” G.W.F. Hegel, “Hegel to von Sinclair, [beginning of 1813],” in Hegel: The Letters, 293.
87
Ibid., 37.
88
“Each principle has reigned for a certain time, and when the whole system of the world has been explained from
this special form, it is called a philosophical system. Its whole theory has certainly to be learned, but as long as the
principle is abstract it is not sufficient to embrace the forms belonging to our conception of the world.” Ibid., 38.
89
Ibid., 40.
90
Ibid., 37.
91
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood and tran. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 61.
92
Ibid., 61.

13
this is why we “cannot therefore say that the concept arrives at anything new; on the contrary,
the last determination coincides in unity with the first.”93
Thus far Hegel simply described only logical development. But he then argued that in
“the empirical sciences, it is customary to analyse what is found in representational thought, and
when the individual instance has been reduced to the common quality, this common quality is
then called the concept.”94 As opposed to this approach of seeking the general characteristic
shared by a group of phenomena, Hegel recognised that the concept determines itself and so
what is gained “in this way…is a series of thoughts and another series of existent shapes, in
which it may happen that the temporal sequence of their actual appearance is to some extent
different from the conceptual sequence.”95 The example he provided was that “we cannot
say…that property existed before the family, although property is nevertheless dealt with first.”96
More specifically, in the Philosophy of Right property comes before family, although this order
of development is the reverse in history.
In summing up Hegel pointed out that, while one may wonder “why we do not begin with
the highest instance, that is, with the concretely true,” the fact of the matter is that
we wish to see the truth precisely in the form of a result, and it is essential for this
purpose that we should first comprehend the abstract concept itself. What is actual, the
shape which the concept assumes, is therefore from our point of view only the subsequent
and further stage, even if it should itself come first in actuality. The course we follow is
that whereby the abstract forms reveal themselves not as existing for themselves, but as
untrue.97
In terms of Hegel’s example, property came after family in time, but, conceptually, property
comes before family because property is more abstract and family more concrete: logically
family assumes property viz. family is the result of property. More specifically, the movement
from family to property is historical and accidental, while the development of property to family
is logical and necessary. Therefore, although the family existed in time before property, yet
because property came later, it determines the context, the horizon or limits within which the
family currently exists. Ergo, to rationally explain the family now, in the present time, property
must come first because family today presupposes property.
We have seen the truth of this from the preceding discussion. The truth is concrete, and
understood concretely, this does not merely mean that the truth is only a unity of diverse aspects,
but also that it is a result which only arrives after the process of the abstract being sublated into
the concrete. The latter, as has been repeatedly emphasised, constitutes a system and can only be
comprehended and portrayed as such. The organic totality structures the sequence and is the
actual basis for why one concept comes earlier than another and one comes later viz. one is more
abstract and the other is concrete. This is another aspect as to why the conceptual or logical
93
Ibid., 61.
94
Ibid., 61.
95
Ibid., 61.
96
Ibid., 61.
97
Ibid., 61-62.

14
sequence diverges from the historical or temporal. Thus, if the truth is a result, i.e. if it is
historically subsequent, then it must be logically prior. Contrariwise, the historically prior must
be the logically subsequent.
Life appears as a multitude of contingent events, a tangle of accidents. Science’s goal is
to explain the underlying logical necessity. It further knows that the latter is truth and can only be
apprehended concretely as a system i.e. as a process with a result. The logical connection of
stages explains the seeming randomness of phenomena. However, scientific cognition only starts
after the fact, after the development has happened. As Hegel famously remarked in the preface to
his Philosophy of Right:
Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its
formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the
conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the
real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual
kingdom.98
Science, which for Hegel is dialectical logic, therefore, starts with the results of history.99 It
appears to start in reverse, but it seeks the actual beginning and end viz. to re-create the historical
in its truth, in its necessary order. This logical sequence is the movement of the abstract to the
concrete. Hegel, in discussing the progression of his logic, referred to this as the genetic
exposition: “Objective logic therefore, which treats of being and essence constitutes properly the
genetic exposition of the Notion.”100 This is the substantiation of the organic formation of logic.
Hegel argued that while “there are and have been different philosophies,” yet the “Truth
is…one.”101 So that although we see a diversity, all systems were focused on one common goal,
the truth. In fact “the diversity and number of philosophies not only does not prejudice
Philosophy itself,” but rather “such diversity is, and has been, absolutely necessary to the
existence of a science of Philosophy and…is essential to it.”102 Knowledge of the truth, science,
only progresses via debate and conflict, via the dialectic. There being one truth, there is hence
only one philosophy: one colossal endeavour in humanity’s quest. As Hegel and Schelling
asserted early in 1802, “The fact that philosophy is but one, and can only be one, rests on the fact
that Reason is but one.”103 This note had already been struck by Fichte the previous year, when

98
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, tran. S.W. Dyde (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005), xxi.
99
“It may be said that Philosophy first commences when a race for the most part has left its concrete life, when
separation and change of class have begun, and the people approach toward their fall; when a gulf has arisen
between inward strivings and external reality, and the old forms of Religion, &c., are no longer satisfying…Then it
is that Mind takes refuge in the clear space of thought to create for itself a kingdom of thought in opposition to the
world of actuality, and Philosophy is the reconciliation following upon the destruction of that real world which
thought has begun. When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has
gone, the reconciliation is not a reconciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.” Hegel, Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, Volume 1, 52.
100
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, 577.
101
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, 17.
102
Ibid., 19.
103
G.W.F. Hegel and F.W.J. Schelling, “The Critical Journal of Philosophy Introduction on The Essence of
Philosophical Criticism Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in Particular,” in Between

15
he argued that “there is but one single philosophy, just as there is one single mathematics, and
that as soon as this single possible philosophy is found and acknowledged no newer one will
arise, but all earlier so-called philosophies will be considered only experiments and preparatory
work.”104 This final philosophy would be a science. Therefore Fichte called his new system “the
Science of Knowledge,” and it was yet a new effort “to raise philosophy to science,” one which
would be the “foundation of all other sciences, a scientific philosophy.”105
Hegel again followed Fichte and so he also aimed to help “bring philosophy closer to the
form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual
knowing.”106 He was successful insofar as he laid the basis for philosophy to develop into a
science. The Young Hegelian August Cieszkowski therefore correctly argued in 1838 that
“Hegel’s greatness and historical significance” was that he was “at least…the beginning of the
end of philosophy, just as in Aristotle we see if not its beginning properly speaking, at least the
end of its beginning.”107 It was up to another Young Hegelian, Karl Marx, to achieve what Fichte
and Hegel sought for and what Cieszkowski proclaimed. Marx did this by positively negating,
i.e. sublating Hegel and developing a method for modern social science. The logic of philosophy,
then, was such that it had to give way to science, thus leaving philosophy in the museum as a
relic of our collective intellectual past.108 It is to Marx’s method that we now turn.
Marx
Hegel’s method sought to discern the basic dialectical logic of reality. When it came to
history, that inner rationality was, at places, designated as rooted in the continuity of human
activity, and elsewhere in the acts of God.109 So when, in relation to the history of philosophy,
Hegel argued that “the master workman of this labour of thousands of years is the One living
Spirit, whose thinking nature is to bring to consciousness what it is,” he could be taken to mean
either humanity or God, or even both. His work was, and is, therefore open to an idealist or

Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. George Di Giovanni and H.S. Harris
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000), 275.
104
J.G. Fichte, “A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest
Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand,” in Philosophy of German Idealism: Fichte, Jacobi, and
Schelling, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 39.
105
Ibid., 39-40.
106
Hegel, Phenomenology, tran. Miller, 3.
107
August Cieszkowski, “Prolegomena to historiosophy,” in August Cieszkowski, Selected Writings of August
Cieszkowski, ed. André Liebich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 71.
108
“And just as the poetry of art stepped over into the prose of thought, so must philosophy descend from the height
of theory to the plane of praxis. To be practical philosophy, or (stated more properly) the philosophy of praxis,
whose most concrete effect on life and social relations is the development of truth in concrete activity - this is the
future fate of philosophy in general…One is entirely correct, therefore, in stating that the revolutionary movements
of our time have resulted from philosophy. However, one should have added that, after philosophy had attained its
classicity, a contrary evolution was to be expected from it which will mediate the abstractness directly deriving from
it. It will develop into the positively concrete. By that we do not mean a return onto the old beaten tracks. This is so
because whatever world history has passed judgment upon can never be reanimated.” August Cieszkowski,
“Prolegomena to Historiosophie (1838),” in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 77, 83.
109
“The great assumption that what has taken place on this side, in the world, has also done so in conformity with
reason – which is what first gives the history of Philosophy its true interest – is nothing else than trust in
Providence.” Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, 35.

16
materialist interpretation.110 The latter was the course which Marx took. Thus, on the one hand
Marx asserted that “the Hegelian ‘contradiction’” was “the source of all dialectics,” viz. the
origin of his own approach was located in Hegel’s work.111 On the other hand, he wrote that his
“dialectical method” was “in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly
opposite to it.”112 Despite this source, Marx’s own approach had a different premise, namely that
with “Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject,
under the name of ‘the Idea’, is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the
external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material
world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.”113 With a radically
opposite basis, Marx’s dialectical logic had a related, but different view of thought.
By “ideal” Marx referred to thought. Yet he did not mean the subjective consciousness of
a single human, but rather the objectively existing thought of society, viz. the world of ideas,
concepts, theories, etc., that each new generation and individual finds pre-existing, and which are
embodied in objects and forms of activity. An example of this is the value of commodities, i.e.
their value-form. A commodity has two aspects: use-value and exchange-value. This latter “can
of course exist only symbolically, although in order for it to be employed as a thing and not
merely as a formal notion, this symbol must possess an objective existence; it is not merely an
ideal notion, but is actually presented to the mind in an objective mode.”114 That is, people must
actively treat a product as having value in order to confer upon it the status of a commodity, and
this is exactly what they do in exchange. Hence, it is only by means of this activity “that the
products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their
sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility.”115 Therefore, it must be stressed that when
Marx declared that the “price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value
generally, quite distinct from their palpable and real bodily form; it is therefore a purely ideal or
notional form,” he was not saying that it is imaginary, that it takes place in subjective thinking.116
Instead his point was that the ideal is an aspect of collective activity: it is social signification
constructed and formed by humans in the process of their lives.117

110
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 38; “The temple of self-conscious reason is to be considered from this the point
of view alone worthy of the history of Philosophy. It is hence rationally built by an inward master worker, and not in
Solomon’s method, as freemasons build.” Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1, 35.
111
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, tran. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage
Books, 1977), 744.
112
Ibid., 102.
113
Ibid., 102.
114
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tran. Martin Nicolaus (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973), 154.
115
Marx, Capital, 166.
116
Ibid., 189; “Money only circulates commodities which have already been ideally transformed into money, not
only in the head of the individual but in the conception held by society (directly, the conception held by the
participants in the process of buying and selling).” Marx, Grundrisse, 187.
117
The “value-form of the commodity is its social form.” Karl Marx, “The Value-Form,” Capital and Class 4
(Spring, 1978): 134; “The ideal is therefore nothing else than the form of things, but existing outside things, namely
in man, in the form of his active practice, i.e. it is the socially determined form of the human being’s activity.” E.V.
Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic: Essays on Its History and Theory (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 260.

17
A more general example of ideality can be found in an important letter which Marx wrote
to Pavel Annenkov in 1846. In the course of delivering a broad, incisive review of Proudhon’s
The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty, Marx also discussed his
own method and the question of economic categories. He pointed out that humans, in producing
their “social relations…also produce the ideas, categories, that is to say the ideal abstract
expressions of those same social relations. Thus the categories are no more eternal than the
relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.”118 These categories are the
conceptual form in which humans come to comprehend their existence. In the case of the
categories of bourgeois political economy, such as profit or monopoly, they simply “express
bourgeois relations in the form of thought,” and hence they “only remain true while these
relations exist.”119 Marx also characterised the categories as “historical laws which are valid only
for a particular historical development.”120 With this description he was pointing out that they
express the tendency, the inner logic of a historical mode of production. Therefore the system of
categories of bourgeois political economy express the “immanent laws of capitalist
production.”121 The bulk of Marx’s work was dedicated to revealing these laws, “these
tendencies winning their way through and working themselves out with iron necessity.”122 His
Capital, then, critically depicts the logic of capitalism.123
When Marx contrasted his dialectical method with that of Hegel, he also distinguished
between what he termed “the method of presentation” and “that of inquiry.”124 The latter “has to
appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down
their inner connection.”125 This method is also known as the analytical method and it serves as
the prerequisite for the first-named method. As Marx went on to argue, only “after this work has
been done can the real movement be appropriately presented.”126 This was an eminently logical
approach for Marx to argue because, echoing Hegel, he pointed out that “Reflection on the forms
of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to
their real development. Reflection begins post festum, and therefore with the results of the
process of development ready to hand.”127 It the case of the development of capitalist political
economy “it was solely the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination
of the magnitude of value.”128 More broadly, it was only by means of the examination of the

118
Karl Marx, “Marx to P.V. Annenkov in Paris,” in Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the
“Philosophy of Poverty” by M. Proudhon (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 174.
119
Ibid., 172, 175.
120
Ibid., 172.
121
Marx, Capital, 433.
122
Ibid., 91.
123
“The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, IF YOU LIKE, a critical
exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the
system.” Karl Marx, “Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 22 February 1858,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected
Works Volume 40, Letters 1856-59 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), 270.
124
Marx, Capital, 102.
125
Ibid., 102.
126
Ibid., 102.
127
Ibid., 168.
128
Ibid., 168.

18
later, complex developments of the value-form, that its earlier, simpler stages were
comprehended.129
However, the above must not be taken to suggest that Marx himself accomplished all of
this. Rather the analytical operation was both the logical and historical prerequisite to his own
genetic method. This preparatory labour was already accomplished by the bourgeois political
economists who came before Marx. Thus he informed Engels that the conception of value as
having “no ‘substance’ other than labour itself,” was “first worked out sketchily by Petty and
properly by Ricardo.”130 This definition was, of course, an abstraction from the more concrete
forms of value, and, as such, was “an historical abstraction which could only be evolved on the
basis of a particular economic development of society.”131 In general it was what Marx described
as “classical political economy” which sought to
reduce the various fixed and mutually alien forms of wealth to their inner unity by means
of analysis and to strip away the form in which they exist independently alongside one
another…to grasp the inner connection in contrast to the multiplicity of outward forms. It
therefore reduces rent to surplus profit, so that it ceases to be a specific, separate form
and is divorced from its apparent source, the land. It likewise divests interest of its
independent form and shows that it is a part of profit. In this way it reduces all types of
revenue and all independent forms and titles under cover of which the non-workers
receive a portion of the value of commodities, to the single form of profit.132
Classical political economy’s goal, in its method of inquiry, was to “carry through the reduction
and to prove that the various forms are derived from one and the same source.”133 And regardless
of any errors which cropped up, it was precisely this “analytical method, with which criticism
and understanding must begin.”134 Even so, the classical political economists were “not
interested in elaborating how the various forms come into being,” and instead they sought to
“reduce them to their unity by means of analysis, because it starts from them as given
premises.”135 In other words, the aim at that time was not to show the actual genesis of capital,
but simply to find what lay underneath it.136 Considering the nature of human cognition, the

129
“The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very simple and slight in content.
Nevertheless, the human mind has sought in vain for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it, while on the
other hand there has been at least an approximation to a successful analysis of forms which are much richer in
content and more complex. Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells. Moreover, in the
analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction
must replace both.” Ibid., 89-90.
130
Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels in Manchester, April 2, 1858,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected
Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982), 98.
131
Ibid., 98.
132
Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Volume IV of Capital, Part III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 500.
133
Ibid., 500.
134
Ibid., 500.
135
Ibid., 500.
136
“Economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, who are the historians of this epoch, have no other mission than that
of showing how wealth is acquired in bourgeois production relations, of formulating these relations into categories,
into laws, and of showing how superior these laws, these categories, are for the production of wealth to the laws and
categories of feudal society.” Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 115.

19
classical bourgeois political economists could not have taken any other approach, and that is why
“analysis is the necessary prerequisite of genetical presentation, and of the understanding of the
real, formative process in its different phases.”137
Marx’s fullest discussion of this distinction took place in the Grundrisse and there he
described the analytical method as the descent from the concrete to the abstract, and the genetic
method as the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. He began by observing that, at first
glance, it appeared right to begin the critique of political economy with the facts as they are
immediately found, that is “to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition,
thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of
the entire social act of production.”138 Yet he quickly noted that “on closer examination this
proves false,” because the concept of a population would be a mere abstraction if we ignore “the
classes of which it is composed,” and which itself would also be an abstraction if we were “not
familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital.”139 Indeed, even capital
it “is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc.”140 Ignoring the
presuppositions of the phenomena one seeks to comprehend will not work. Everything exists
within broader sets of relations, but the key question is how they are organised.
Accordingly, Marx argued that starting with the category of population would mean
beginning with “a chaotic conception of the whole.”141 That is, one’s perspective would be
disorganized and unsystematic from the outset. To remedy this one would have to, “by means of
further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts from the imagined
concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until” one “had arrived at the simplest
determinations,” i.e. a number of abstract categories.142 Once this operation had been developed,
the process would have to be reversed until reaching population again, “but this time not as the
chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.”143
The initial process described by Marx was the analytical method, as it produced the basic
categories of political economy via abstraction. As argued above, this was exactly
the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of
the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation,
state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a
small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour,
money, value, etc.144
Marx then said that once these abstract determinations had been clearly formulated and
developed, “there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such

137
Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 500.
138
Marx, Grundrisse, 100.
139
Ibid., 100.
140
Ibid., 100.
141
Ibid., 100.
142
Ibid., 100.
143
Ibid., 100.
144
Ibid., 100.

20
as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between
nations and the world market.”145 This second approach is the genetic method and, for Marx, it
is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the
concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the
process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of
departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of
departure for observation and conception. Along the first path the full conception was
evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract
determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.146
This “method of rising from the abstract to the concrete” is the correct approach because it “is
only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the
mind.”147 So although science begins with a study of the facts, with their critical analysis, actual
scientific cognition only starts when the inner connection of those same facts viz. the logic by
means of which the various forms of a phenomena come into being, is traced. This is why Marx,
in following this motion, starts with the commodity: because in “bourgeois society, the
commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic
cell-form.”148 It is the simplest relation from which the organic totality of capitalist production
dialectically develops. Each form is sublated by a higher, more complex one and, in turn, serves
as the premise or germ from which the next one develops. Thus the “simple commodity form
is…the germ of the money-form.”149 This later gives way to capital and the subsequent forms.150
Although this genetic method is the correct one, Marx cautioned that it was “by no means
the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.”151 That is, reality does not exactly
parallel our comprehension of it. As an example Marx provided the following:
the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population,
moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family,
or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation
within an already given, concrete, living whole. As a category, by contrast, exchange
value leads an antediluvian existence.152
Marx’s argument was that historically the family certainly existed before the appearance of
exchange value, but logically it is actually prior to the family. Hence, in order to study the family

145
Ibid., 100-101.
146
Ibid., 101.
147
Ibid., 101.
148
Marx, Capital, 90.
149
Ibid., 163.
150
“This dialectical process of its becoming is only the ideal expression of the real movement through which capital
comes into being. The later relations are to be regarded as developments coming out of this germ.” Marx,
Grundrisse, 310.
151
Ibid., 101.
152
Ibid., 101.

21
as it exists within capitalist society, one would first have to understand capital. In this connection
he made a significant reference to Hegel:
But do not these simpler categories also have an independent historical or natural
existence pre-dating the more concrete ones? That depends. Hegel, for example, correctly
begins the Philosophy of Right with possession, this being the subject’s simplest juridical
relation. But there is no possession preceding the family or master-servant relations,
which are far more concrete relations. However, it would be correct to say that there are
families or clan groups which still merely possess, but have no property. It is incorrect
that possession develops historically into the family. 153
Ergo, what was described as the genetic method is really the logical method, as opposed to the
historical. Just as with Hegel, so with Marx: the order of categories logically diverges to an
extent from the actual historical development. So while it was true that money did “exist
historically, before capital existed, before banks existed, before wage labour existed, etc.,” Marx
concluded that
the simpler category can express the dominant relations of a less developed whole, or else
those subordinate relations of a more developed whole which already had a historic
existence before this whole developed in the direction expressed by a more concrete
category. To that extent the path of abstract thought, rising from the simple to the
combined, would correspond to the real historical process.154
As Hegel had already argued, the logical only coincides with the historical in general and not in
every specific detail. Therefore, to understand the actual role which a category plays within a
social formation means that one must attend to its place within the totality.
Marx also emphasised that “there are very developed but nevertheless historically less
mature forms of society, in which the highest forms of economy, e.g. cooperation, a developed
division of labour, etc., are found, even though there is no kind of money, e.g. Peru.”155 That is,
those categories which are concrete can and do appear before abstract ones. Further, even when a
simple category appears earlier its development does not follow a basic trajectory. For example,
although money “plays a role from very early on, it is nevertheless a predominant element, in
antiquity, only within the confines of certain one-sidedly developed nations, trading nations,”
such as the Greeks.156 Even then money did not “wade its way through all economic relations,”
viz. it did not come to dominate Roman society and so only played a subordinate role.157 As a
result, “although the simpler category may have existed historically before the more concrete, it
can achieve its full (intensive and extensive) development precisely in a combined form of
society, while the more concrete category was more fully developed in a less developed form of
society.”158 History, then, does not follow a linear trajectory and this is another reason why the

153
Ibid., 102.
154
Ibid., 102.
155
Ibid., 102.
156
Ibid., 103.
157
Ibid., 103.
158
Ibid., 103.

22
logical and the historical do not and cannot coincide exactly. Therefore, neither method can be
replaced by the other so there is a need for both approaches in science.
Marx cautioned that in order to comprehend “the succession of the economic categories,
as in any other historical, social science,” it must be kept in mind that the subject being studied is
“modern bourgeois society” and hence “these categories…express the forms of being, the
characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this
subject.”159 The logical approach has to presume an already organically-developed capitalist
society. It is for this reason that although it might initially appear rational to “begin with ground
rent, with landed property, since this is bound up with the earth, the source of all production and
of all being, and with the first form of production of all more or less settled societies –
agriculture. But nothing would be more erroneous.”160 This is because in
all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the
rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general
illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a
particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has
materialized within it.161
This holds true for all social formations, so that in the case of societies where the system of
agriculture “predominates, as in antiquity and in the feudal order, even industry, together with its
organization and the forms of property corresponding to it, has a more or less landed-proprietary
character; is either completely dependent on it, as among the earlier Romans, or, as in the Middle
Ages, imitates, within the city and its relations, the organization of the land.”162 Thus, in the
capitalist mode of production we get the reverse, so that
Agriculture more and more becomes merely a branch of industry, and is entirely
dominated by capital…Ground rent cannot be understood without capital. But capital can
certainly be understood without ground rent. Capital is the all-dominating economic
power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point,
and must be dealt with before landed property. After both have been examined in
particular, their interrelation must be examined.”163
It is not enough then to say that, in general, the role a category has is merely determined by its
place in the concrete whole, because each totality has a specific form of ordering, an exact
hierarchy, and its relations are therefore not one of equal reciprocity. For this reason it would
be infeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same
sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined,
rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the

159
Ibid., 106.
160
Ibid., 106.
161
Ibid., 106-107.
162
Ibid., 107.
163
Ibid., 107.

23
opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical
development.164
Accordingly, it is only by studying a society as a historically specific totality, viz. by
comprehending the system of primary and subordinate relations, can the order of categories be
properly determined.165
It will be recalled that as a new stage arises in development, it sublates the previous one.
That is to say, not only is the later qualitatively different from the preceding, but it subordinates
the latter to itself. Therefore, a new phase is not reducible to what came before it and so it must
be understood not merely historically, but also on its own terms, in itself. Marx’s brief comments
on urban life in the Grundrisse are extremely enlightening on this matter. He asserted that
although “the flight of serfs to the cities is one of the historic conditions and presuppositions of
urbanism, it is not a condition, not a moment of the reality of developed cities, but belongs rather
to their past presuppositions, to the presuppositions of their becoming which are suspended in
their being.”166 While the urban grows out of the rural, at a certain point it develops on its own
tracks, has its own logic, and indeed, comes to dominate and determine the rural. In Ilyenkov’s
excellent formulation the “dialectics of this relation consists in a kind of inversion of the
historically preceding into the subsequent and vice versa, the transformation of the condition into
the conditioned, of the effect into a cause.”167 Thus, although there is a logic to history, it is not
one of historical pre-determinism.
This same dialectical process takes place with capitalist society itself viz. the “conditions
and presuppositions of the becoming, of the arising, of capital presuppose precisely that it is not
yet in being but merely in becoming; they therefore disappear as real capital arises, capital which
itself, on the basis of its own reality, posits the conditions for its realization.”168 That is, the
premises of the original formation of capital are not and cannot be formed by capital itself, and
they therefore belong to the pre-history of capital.169 This process of capital’s being sublating its
becoming leads to the reversal of cause and effect so that these
presuppositions, which originally appeared as conditions of its becoming – and hence
could not spring from its action as capital – now appear as results of its own realization,

164
Ibid., 107.
165
“While in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois
economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system. This
organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in
subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is
historically how it becomes a totality.” Ibid., 278.
166
Ibid., 459.
167
E.V. Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1982), 208-209. See also, E.V. Ilyenkov, Intelligent Materialism: Essays on Hegel and Dialectics, tran. and ed.
Evgeni V. Pavlov (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020), 198.
168
Marx, Grundrisse, 459.
169
“Therefore, the conditions which preceded the creation of surplus capital I, or which express the becoming of
capital, do not fall into the sphere of that mode of production for which capital serves as the presupposition; as the
historic preludes of its becoming, they lie behind it, just as the processes by means of which the earth made the
transition from a liquid sea of fire and vapour to its present form now lie beyond its life as finished earth.” Ibid.,
460.

24
reality, as posited by it – not as conditions of its arising, but as results of its presence. It
no longer proceeds from presuppositions in order to become, but rather it is itself
presupposed, and proceeds from itself to create the conditions of its maintenance and
growth.170
Only after capital is standing on its own two feet does it begin to produce its own premises viz.
the capitalist mode of production produces its own conditions of existence. Of course, a pre-
capitalist accumulation may be repeated on a local level, as “individual capitals can continue to
arise e.g. by means of hoarding. But the hoard is transformed into capital only by means of the
exploitation of labour.”171 Consequently, such an activity can only be subsidiary, and for it to
persist as capital within capitalist society means that it must conform to the latter’s basic logic.
Marx’s method created, for the first time, a scientific approach to history because it
indicated “the points where historical investigation must enter in,” by scrupulously determining
the point where the life-course of a mode of production begins proper.172 In order to be able to
“develop the laws of bourgeois economy, therefore, it is not necessary to write the real history of
the relations of production,” viz. as a historically new phase of economy, these laws are not
reducible to the laws of feudal economy.173 In fact, “the correct observation and deduction” of
the laws of bourgeois society can provide us with insight both into the formations that preceded
it and to where the present system is tending.174 But this knowledge can only be, of course, a
general outline.
The dialectics of the historical and logical are an integral, though subsidiary aspect within
Marx’s overall dialectical method which, as I have shown above, descended from Hegel. Indeed,
Marx once wrote that it was Hegel who had developed the “true laws of dialectics.”175 It is
significant to observe though, that while he asserted the existence of multiple laws, he did not
provide an exact enumeration. In fact, he only directly mentioned one during a discussion on
surplus-value in Capital volume 1. There he declared that
The possessor of money or commodities actually turns into a capitalist in such cases only
where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum of the
middle ages. Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered
by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point
pass into qualitative changes.176

170
Ibid., 460.
171
Ibid., 460.
172
Ibid., 460.
173
Ibid., 460.
174
Ibid., 460-461.
175
Karl Marx, “Marx to Joseph Dietzgen,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 43: 1868-
70 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 31. Marx also argued that Hegel was “the first to comprehend the entire
history of philosophy” despite committing “errors of detail.” See, Marx, “Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 22 February
1858,” 269.
176
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I Book One: The Process of Production of Capital
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), 292.

25
He also referred to two other laws in the same work, but in those instance only indirectly. First,
in analysing the two poles of the value-form Marx emphasised the mutual dependence of the two
different commodities and noted that such “expressions of relations in general, called by Hegel
reflex-categories, form a very curious class. For instance, one man is king only because other
men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects
because he is king.”177 Such opposites mutually exclude and assume each other. Marx’s third and
final mention occurred during his overview of the historical life-course of capitalist society.
There he stated that the “capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of
production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private
property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the
inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation.”178 Finally,
Marx deployed a number of dialectical categories throughout Capital such as abstract and
concrete, quantity and quality, essence and appearance, etc., especially in the crucial chapter 1.
It was Engels who first attached a number to the laws of dialectics and who provided an
explicit statement. He argued that the “laws of dialectics” were simply “the most general laws”
of nature, society, and thought.179 He did not say exactly how many there were but he did state
that “they can be reduced in the main to three.”180 The implication is that there are other laws,
but that they are secondary to the three which must therefore be primary. Hence there is in fact a
system of laws. The three that Engels listed were: “The law of the transformation of quantity into
quality and vice versa; The law of the interpenetration of opposites; The law of the negation of
the negation,” and they were “developed by Hegel” from the three main sections of his Logic:
Being, Essence, and Notion.181 It is therefore quite incorrect to presume that Engels’ work in this
regard is opposed to that of Marx. In fact, in light of Marx’s Capital, Engels’ writing on this
question in his Dialectics of Nature simply made explicit what was largely implicit in Marx.182
Marx’s method is dialectical logic. The dialectic is more than the laws and categories, but
includes the transitions between them: the movement of immediate to mediate, abstract to
concrete, simple to complex, negation-sublation, concept, judgement, syllogism, system-totality,
historical and logical. The dialectic is multi-dimensional and all these aspect are united and flow.
They do not form a web, but a living organic whole, moving and developing. Therefore, limiting
dialectics to merely the laws, or just the laws and categories, can only be considered one-sided,
abstract, and hence untrue. It would violate the spirit of the dialectic and would scarcely be better

177
Ibid., 63; “The categories of reflection used to be taken up in the form of propositions, in which they were
asserted to be valid for everything. These propositions ranked as the universal laws of thought that lie at the base of
all thinking, that are absolute in themselves and incapable of proof, but are immediately and incontestably
recognised and accepted as true by all thinking that grasps their meaning.” Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, 409.
178
Ibid., 715.
179
Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 62.
180
Ibid., 62.
181
Ibid., 62.
182
This is similar to Engels’ overview of the historical and logical methods in his review of Marx’s Contribution.
See, Frederick Engels, “Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ Part One, Franz Duncker,
Berlin, 1859,” in Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International
Publishers, 1989), 225-226.

26
than what Engels referred to as the “pauper’s broth of eclecticism.”183 It would be as poor a
substitute for the dialectical method as chicory replacing coffee.184 The method includes all the
above interrelations and this is dialectical logic. As to the question of the dialectic of the
historical and logical, logic expresses the necessary laws of motion which are contained within
the contingency of history.
Going Back to the Future
While the goal of Marxism is to radically change the world, this can only occur on the
basis of a correct conception. This further requires intellectual labour for, as Marx perceptively
declared, “all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided
with their essence.”185 Knowledge is not immediate and how things appear at first glance
generally runs counter to the actual process. For this reason, “it is a task of science to reduce the
merely phenomenal movement to the actual inner movement.”186 Marx’s method seeks to reveal
the specific immanent logic of what it studies so that it can be altered in the service of humanity.
Lenin, in studying Hegel, came to the conclusion that the latter’s dialectic was “a
generalisation of the history of thought.”187 This echoes a statement made by Engels in a letter to
Kautsky: “Marx summarises the common content lying in things and relations and reduces it to
its general logical expression. His abstraction therefore only reflects, in the form of thought, the
content already reposing in the things.”188 Yet whereas Hegel explicitly denied the ability to
predict even in general outline possible future developments, forever focusing philosophy’s face
on the past, Marx’s stance was the opposite. The whole purpose of science is not the simple
recording of facts, but to enable the improvement of our species. This, therefore, is Marx’s
inversion: where instead of the present being made to serve the past, the past is made to serve the
present. Or, in other words, the past will no longer be an obstacle to the future, but rather a
vehicle for it.

183
Frederick Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 594.
184
“In place of the long process of culture towards genuine philosophy, a movement as rich as it is profound,
through which Spirit achieves knowledge, we are offered as quite equivalent either direct revelations from heaven,
or the sound common sense…and we are assured that these are quite as good substitutes as some claim chicory is for
coffee.” Hegel, Phenomenology, tran. Miller, 41-42.
185
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three, tran. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage
Books, 1981), 956.
186
Karl Marx, Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, tran. Ben Fowkes and ed. Fred Moseley (Leiden: Brill,
2016), 419.
187
V.I. Lenin, “Plan of Hegel’s Dialectics (Logic),” in V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 38: Philosophical
Notebooks (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 316.
188
Frederick Engels, “Engels to K. Kautsky, September 20 1884,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected
Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 379.

27

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