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Samuel Poirot (2018190278)

Prof. Minwoo Yoon

Humanities and Related Fields – CLC4721.01-00

June 17th, 2021

A Thorough Critic of Marx Backed on Hegel

Jeffrey Abramson’s Minerva’s Owl offers an invaluable insight into the greatest Western
philosophers from Plato all the way to Marx. Spending all semester studying each of them, I discovered a
specific appreciation I hold for Georg Hegel, which immediately came into contract with my disliking for
Marx, as Abramson explains the former through the latter’s interpretation. Hegel seems to be a realistic
optimist, while Marx a deluded pessimist, and the world seems to be in severe shortage of the likes of the
former, while in abundance of the latter. Let us therefore establish in which ways Marx’s rational is
flawed, and on which pivotal aspects did he drift away from Hegel.

Let us start Marx’s critique with his claim in which he defined his mindset that he is “waiting for
the philosophizing to end and the politicking to begin.” (301) It does not seem to be a good idea to focus
on politization to the detriment of philosophy. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, and as the quote and
popular knowledge holds, politics is closer to the art of lying. Both do not coexist well. The real
philosopher does not want to be a politician. And conversely, if a politician tries to be philosophical, it is
most likely insincere, irrelevant and/or inappropriate. Therefore, politics can never replace philosophy. It
actually reveals a lot about the theorist when his desire is to terminate wisdom to the profit of lying.
Philosophy is the art of raising questions while a competent politician is expected to find solutions. Marx
decides to “abolish philosophy […] by practicing it,” and along with it, a massive part of western
thought, in a movement which seems to the precursor of deconstructionism. (303)

Furthermore, one learns that Marx “always stayed with Hegel’s moral objection to liberal
societies for lacking any robust common good or genuine concern for the welfare of others” which is a
positive point. (303) Nonetheless, it is also mentioned that Marx did “develop his own critique of liberal
society in economic terms” and that seems to be an extremely fragmented view on reality. The real world
sees inequality which absolutely transcends the economic aspect of society. Inequality ranges from
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natural attributes such as intelligence, strength and such to personal attributes such as hobbies, interest,
etc. For example, a boxer who is very muscular and well-built will probably be remarkably successful in
his sporting endeavors compared to a small and frail person. Those inequalities cannot be overlooked.
Human societies predate economic disparity, and therefore, the latter is not innate to the former.

Mark’s ideology can be somewhat summarized by his objective as he “set out to demonstrate that
the reviled sphere of civil society, and not the revered sphere of the state, carried with it the germ of a
better future.” (303) This point could be a valid one, since governments, more often than not, are
susceptible to corruption. This is true all throughout the world and throughout history. The solution might
just rely on the “sphere of society.” Nonetheless, the improvement of the world is derived from the
improvement of every single human being, on an individual scale. This individualism, however, is the
opposite of Marx’s doctrine. Individuals are famously undistinguishable under communism, for every
man and woman should be equal. Two points can be taken away from this argument. Firstly, without the
focus on individualism, it is more difficult to find a responsible when errors are committed, and thus more
difficult to improve. Secondly, as communism set out to equalize every human being, it brought most of it
down. Equality can be achieved by bringing the top down, or by bringing the bottom up. Communism
systematically chose the former, and the latter remained a fanciful dream.

In opposition to Marx, Minerva’s Owl exposes a much more moderate and composed approach to
political philosophy: “Expressing his disdain for utopian speculations, Hegel remarked that the task of the
political theorist is to understand the actual existing state, not to “construct a state as it ought to be.””
(304) As history knows it, the German Reich under Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin’s USSR both aimed at
achieving a utopian status. As Hegel lived between 1770 and 1831, he preceded the most tyrannical and
despotic governments European history had witnessed. His assertion that a political theorist must
understand the current state instead of chasing a utopia is therefore quite innovative and avant-gardist for
his time. Usually, people err, and the following generations learn from the mistakes. Hegel did not need to
witness the mistake to understand the consequences of a utopian-aimed society. Nonetheless, Marx parts
with Hegel on this notion as his philosophy systematical pursuit this fantasy.

Furthermore, Hegel supports philosophy as the art of understand the existing state of things,
while Marx desires to depart from it. The former believes the “owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with
the falling of the dusk,” to signify the acquiring of knowledge with the crumbling of a civilization. (304)
As the passage reads the quote from Hegel including the phrase poetically eponymous with Abramson’s
book through the mention to the Roman goddess of wisdom, the reader understands there is true wisdom
behind Hegel’s thought that philosophy comes to clarify the nature of things, not reimagine the current
society with utopian standards. Marx despised this iteration of philosophy for being fundamentally distant
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from politics. It did not matter to him that history symbolically demonstrates philosophy and politics are
antinomic as “Plato withdrew from politics in disgust at Socrates’ execution.” Marx seems to provide a
voluntary blind eye to certain fundamental pillars of discord between the two subject areas, and,
incidentally, reveals an axiomatically flawed deduction process and irrational reasoning.

Hegel’s belief in that the actual state of things “already contains, or at least gestures towards, the
ideal” is overwhelmingly optimistic. (305) On the other hand, Marx would be more likely to describe the
world in the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth “a tale told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing.” This blasphemy and nihilism found in Marx’s rational is breeding fuel for negativity, hatred,
and suffering, all of which were found in the communist regimes which followed his manifesto. Hegel, in
comparison, is extremely positive in his implication that “political ideas are realizable in history if we
dare to act to change the actual.” (305) Interestingly enough, Marx derived from Hegel’s aphorismic
statement “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” mostly negative conclusions about the
current state of things, namely that a revolution not only was desirable, but it was also possible according
to his mentor. (304)

The biggest critique to be made on Marx is his hatred and vicious attack on the status quo of
society. It could be the case, and it is evidently the case that society is flawed in some way, but it is worth
noting that the capitalist economical model has seen the most people risen out of poverty, while all
communism did was to lead millions of Ukrainian and Chinese peasants to starvation, and sentence
millions more Russians to death or exile in the gulags. Furthermore, Marx supports that “the concrete
person is bifurcated into two existences, one as a person in civil society, the other as a citizen of the
state.” (307) There are certain problems with this claim. The first is that the “concrete” person seems to
entail a fully secular individual, stripped of spiritualism and religion. Human beings are spiritual animals
by and large and need beliefs in order to live meaningful lives. The second is that asserting there are only
two existences in which human beings are distributed, and that both include others is quite dangerous.
This means that an individual only exists through the existence of others. Nothing is left to the individual.

In conclusion, Marx seems to be flawed in a peculiar way, in which he naively envisions a “new
social order [where] there will no longer be any need for politics, since the class struggle, and hence
injustice, will have been overcome.” (321) Injustice, under the denomination of inequality of outcome, is
absolutely desirable in any society. Equality of opportunity and inequality of outcome are the secret to a
well-functioning meritocratic society. It has been shown and proven that a society with no injustice is
impossible. It would lead to a nihilism and defeatism for people would no longer need to work or provide
effort in order to be rewarded, thus crippling efficiency, production and society as a whole. His departing
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from Hegelian philosophy shows an innate pessimism which is much more hurtful than the society Marx
himself criticizes.

Word Count: 1414

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Works Cited

Jeffrey B Abramson. Minerva’s Owl : The Tradition of Western Political Thought. Harvard

University Press, 2009.