ALIENATION IN HEGEL
AND MARX
Although its roots lie far back in the
Judeo-Christian
tradition, the concept of alienation first gained promi-
nence in the philosophy of Hegel, and
particularly in
his mature writings. There are signs of the idea in
his
earlier works, but it is not until the Phenomenology
(1808), thought by many to be Hegel's most
important
work, that alienation occupies a central place in his
writings.
In the opening sections of the Phenomenology Hegel
attacked the views of common sense and simplified
natural science that the
world consisted of discrete
objects independent of man's consciousness.
Truth, for
Hegel, was not to be found in knowledge that was
purified
of any influence from man's own desires and
feelings. Ultimately Hegel
considered that there could
be no truth that was not intimately linked with
the
ongoing process of human beings as thinking subjects;
truth was
their truth. The supposed objectivity of the
world of nature was in fact an alienation, for man's
task was to discover,
behind these appearances, his own
essential life and finally to view
everything as a facet
of his own self-consciousness. The same principle
ap-
plied to the world of culture in which
such spheres
as art and religion, if viewed as independent of man,
constituted so many alienations to be overcome by
integration into the
final understanding and recapitula-
tion
which was Absolute Knowledge.
The central actor in this process for Hegel was Spirit.
Hegel thought that
reality was Spirit developing itself.
In this process Spirit produced a
world that it thought
at first was external; only later did it realize that
this
world was its own production. Spirit was not something
separated
from this productive activity; it only existed
in and through this
activity. At the beginning of this
process Spirit was not aware that it was
externalizing
or alienating itself. Only gradually did Spirit realize
that the world was not external to it. It was the failure
to realize this
that constituted, for Hegel, alienation.
This alienation would cease when
men became fully
self-conscious and understood their environment and
their culture to be emanations of Spirit. Freedom con-
sisted in this understanding, and freedom was the aim
of history.
Hegel had created a system; and all his disciples
agreed that it was the
final one. However, when it came
to applying the system to particular
problems, they
conceived their Master's system to be ambivalent. The
fact that alienation seemed to them to be a challenge,
something to be
overcome, led them to put the em-
phasis on the
concepts of dialectic and negativity in
Hegel's system; and thus they
challenged, first in reli-
gion and then in
politics, the Master's view that the
problem of alienation had, at least in
principle, been
solved. The foremost among these radical disciples of
Hegel, Bruno Bauer, applied the concept of alienation
to the religious
field. Bauer, who lectured in theology
and made his name as a Gospel
critic, considered that
religious beliefs, and in particular Christianity,
caused
a division in man's consciousness by becoming opposed
to this
consciousness as a separate power. Thus religion
was an attitude towards
the essence of self-conscious-
ness
that had become estranged from itself. In this
context, Bauer promoted the
use of the expression
“self-alienation” that soon
became current among the
Young Hegelians.
Like Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach was also fas-
cinated by the problem of religious alienation, but his
concept
of it was much simpler. Whereas Bauer con-
sidered that men's religious creations eventually
adopted an inhuman
form, Feuerbach saw in religion
simply the projection of man's essential
desires and
capacities. Since what was ascribed to God were really
attributes of man, man was separated from himself, and
thus alienated. This
idea was elaborated in Feuerbach's
best known book The
Essence of Christianity, published
in 1841. Feuerbach described
the “fundamental idea”
of his book thus:
“The objective essence of religion,
particularly the Christian
religion, is nothing but the
essence of human, and particularly Christian,
feeling.
The secret of theology is therefore anthropology....
The
foundation of a new science is laid here in that
the philosophy of religion is conceived of and pre-
sented as esoteric or secret anthropology or psychol-
ogy” (McLellan [1969], p.
88).
Feuerbach made an even greater impact through his
Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy and
his Foundations of the Philosophy of the Future,
both
published in 1843. Their major purpose was to point
out that
Hegel's philosophy was just as alienating a
force as religion and needed to
be reabsorbed in the
same manner. Feuerbach began his Theses with the
statement “the secret of theology is
anthropology, but
the secret of speculative philosophy is
theology” (ibid.,
p. 98). In Feuerbach's view, the great
deficiency in
Hegel's philosophy was its negation of theology
“from
the standpoint of theology.” Thus
Hegel—the German
Proclus—never managed to break out
of the circle of
ideas and could not realize the true relationship of
thought to being: “being is the subject, thought the
predicate.” As a philosopher in his own right, Feuer-
bach was only of the second rank: basically he had
one idea that he expounded in many different ways.
As Marx said later:
“Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach
is very poor. Nevertheless,
after Hegel he was epoch-
making because he
put the emphasis on certain points,
uncomfortable for the Christian
consciousness and im-
portant for the progress
of criticism, which Hegel had
left in a sort of mystical twilight between
clarity and
obscurity” (ibid., p. 113).
It was in this atmosphere of rapid secularization that
Marx evolved his own
concept of alienation. Bruno
Bauer had talked of alienation in religion;
Feuerbach
had carried this further by pointing out that Hegel's
philosophy was itself the last bastion of theology;
finally Moses
Hess—nicknamed “the communist
rabbi”—had transferred Feuerbach's ideas to the realm
of economics, by analyzing, in his essay On the Essence
of Money (1844), money as the alienated essence of
man. Marx
accepted all these accounts of alienation,
considering economics to be
fundamental inasmuch as
work was man's basic activity. In all these fields
Marx's
common idea was that man had alienated to someone
or something
what was essential to his nature—
principally, to be in control
of his own activities, to
be the subject and initiator of the historical
process.
In the different forms of alienation some other entity
had
obtained what was proper to man: in religion it
was God, in politics the
State, in economics the market
process and cash nexus. (A note is necessary
on the
German originals of the term “alienation.”
Marx uses
two words to express the concept of alienation:
Entfremdung and Entäusserung. His distinction be-
tween these two words is by no means as precise as
that of Hegel.
Often they appear to be synonymous
and are used together for rhetorical
effect. If anything,
Entfremdung conveys the sense of alienation in which
two people are said to be alienated from each other;
while Entässerung has more the sense of
“making
external to oneself” with legal and
commercial over-
tones. Neither of these words
is to be confused with
Vergegenständlichung, that is,
“objectification,” which,
in Marx as opposed to
Hegel, is a neutral process that
can be either good or bad according to the
partic-
ular circumstances.)
Marx first worked out his ideas in detail with regard
to political
alienation in his Critique of Hegel's Philos-
ophy of Right. Here Marx examined paragraph
by
paragraph Hegel's Philosophy of Right and
claimed
that the state, described by Hegel as productive of,
and
superior to, its own elements, constituted an aliena-
tion of man's essence. Applying to Hegel
Feuerbach's
reversal of subject and predicate, Marx wrote:
“The
Idea is made subjective and the true relationship of
the family and civil society to the state is conceived
of as their
imaginary activity. The family and civil
society are the presuppositions of
the state; they are
its properly active elements. But in speculation
the
relationship is inverted. When the Idea is made a
subject, the
civil society, the family, 'circumstances,
caprice' etc. become unreal
objective phrases of the
Idea and have a completely different
significance”
(Early Texts, p. 62).
The place where Marx wrote at greatst length on
his concept of alienation
and his debt to Hegel are
two passages in the Paris
Manuscripts. In the passage
on “alienated
labour” (ibid., pp. 133ff.), Marx deals
with the relationship of
the worker to his product. The
fact that the worker is related to the
product of his
labor as to an alien object means that the more the
worker produces the more he approaches loss of work
and starvation. Marx
goes on to detail four types of
alienated labor: the alienation of the
product from the
producer; the alienation of the act of production;
the
alienation of nature from men; and finally of man from
his
species-being (a term borrowed from Feuerbach
meaning the common factors
making up man's nature).
This negative picture is complemented by the descrip-
tion that Marx gives of unalienated
man in the notes
that he made on James Mill at the same time as the
writing of the Manuscripts. Put rather roughly, what
Marx means when he talks of alienation is this: it is
man's nature to be
his own creator; he forms and
develops himself by working on and
transforming the
world outside him in cooperation with his fellow men.
In this progressive interchange between man and the
world, it is man's
nature to be in control of this process,
to be the initiator, the subject
in which the process
originates. However, this nature has become alien
to
man; that is, it is no longer his and belongs to another
person or
thing. In religion, for example, it is God who
is the subject of the
historical process and man is in
a state of dependence on His grace. In economics,
according to
Marx, it is money and the processes of
the market that maneuver men around
instead of being
controlled by them. The central point is that man has
lost control of his own evolution and has seen this
control invested in
other entities. What is proper to
man has become the attribute of something
else, and
thus alien to him.
The second passage of importance in the Paris Man-
uscripts is the final section
entitled Critique of Hegel's
Dialectic (ibid., pp.
157ff.). Here Marx began by de-
scribing
Feuerbach's “great achievement” which was
to have
demonstrated that Hegel's philosophy was
merely a different form of the
alienation of man's
nature; Feuerbach had reestablished the primacy of
man's social relationship to man. Marx readily ac-
knowledged his own debt to Hegel. “Therefore the
greatness of Hegel's Phenomenology,” he wrote,
“and
its final product, the dialectic of negativity as the
moving and creating principle, is that Hegel conceived
of the self-creation
of man as a process, objectification
as loss of the object, as
externalisation and the tran-
scendence of
this externalisation. This means, therefore,
that he grasps the nature of
labour and understands
objective man, true, because real man, as the
result
of his own labour” (ibid., p. 164). Nevertheless,
Hegel's
conception of labor was of abstract, mental labor and
he only
succeeded in overcoming alienation in the
realm of consciousness.
Although Hegel said that man suffered from eco-
nomic and political alienation, it was only the thought
of economics
and politics in which Hegel was inter-
ested.
The whole process ended in Absolute Knowl-
edge, with the result that it was the philosopher who
judged the
world. In other words, Hegel had confused
alienation and objectivity. Thus,
according to Hegel,
“What is supposed to be the essence of
alienation that
needs to be transcended is not that man's being ob-
jectifies itself in an inhuman way in
opposition to itself,
but that it objectifies itself in distinction from
and in
opposition to, abstract thought. The appropriation of
man's
objectified and alienated faculties is thus firstly
only an appropriation
that occurs in the mind, in pure
thought, i.e. in abstraction”
(ibid., pp. 162f.). Marx's
central criticism of Hegel, therefore, was that
aliena-
tion would not cease with the
supposed abolition of
the external world. The external world, according
to
Marx, was part of man's nature and the point was to
establish the
right relationship between man and his
environment. Marx therefore rejected
Hegel's notion
of Spirit and replaced its supposed antithesis to the
external world by the antithesis between man and his
social being.
In his early writings, therefore, Marx sketched a
notion of alienation
which, taking the analyses in reli
gion and politics of his contemporary Young Hegelians
as models,
had its roots in the socioeconomic situation
of the worker in capitalist
society. Yet in the 1930's
and '40's, alienation did not play any part in
the many
discussions of Marx's thought. In the 1960's, however,
it was
accepted that it is the major theme running
through
the whole of his writings. Those who wish to
maintain that there is a break
between the “young”
and the
“old” Marx usually maintain that alienation
is a
concept that was entirely restricted to Marx's early
thought and later
abandoned. However, these state-
ments can be
shown to be incorrect.
The term itself occurs much more frequently, even
in Capital, than is commonly realized. In Capital
Marx
writes, for example: “The character of independence
and estrangement which the capitalist modes of pro-
duction as a whole give to the instruments of labour
and the
product, as against the workman, is developed
by means of machinery into a
thorough antagonism”
(I, 432). Yet it is not only a question of
terminology:
the content, too, of Capital is a
continuation of Marx's
early thoughts. The main discussion of Volume
One
of Capital rests on the equation of work and
value that
goes back to the conception of man as a being who
creates
himself and the conditions of his life—a con-
ception outlined in the Paris
Manuscripts. It is man's
nature, according to the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts,
to be constantly developing, in
cooperation with other
men, himself and the world about him. What Marx
in Capital is describing is how this fundamental
role
of man, to be the initiator and controller of the histori-
cal process, has been transferred, or
alienated, and how
it belongs to the inhuman power of Capital.
The counterpart of alienated man, the unalienated
or
“total” man of the Manuscripts,
also appears in
Capital. In the chapter of Volume One on
“Machinery
and Modern Industry” Marx makes the same
contrast
between the effects of alienated and unalienated modes
of
production on the development of human poten-
tiality. He writes: “Modern industry, indeed, compels
society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-
worker of today, crippled by the life-long
repetition
of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced
to
the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed
individual, fit for a
variety of labours, ready to face
any change of production, and to whom the
different
social functions he performs, are but so many modes
of
giving free scope to his own natural and acquired
powers.” The
fact that, in Capital, the conclusion is
supported
by a detailed analysis of the effects of ad-
vanced technology, should not obscure the continuity.
The section of Capital that most recalls the early
writings, is the final section of Chapter One, entitled
“Fetishism of Commodities.” The whole section is
reminiscent of the passage on alienated labor in the
Paris Manuscripts and of the notes on James Mill
that
Marx composed in 1844. Marx writes:
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because
in it
the social character of man's labour appears to them
as an
objective character stamped upon that labour; because
the relation
of the producers to the sum total of their labour,
is presented to
them as a social relation, existing not be-
tween themselves, but between the products of their
labour
(I, 488).
However, the writing that best shows the centrality
of the concept of
alienation to Marx's thought is the
Grundrisse. This manuscript is the thousand-page
draft
that served Marx as a basis for Capital but
remained
unpublished until 1941. The Grundrisse, of
which the
Critique of Political Economy and Capital are only
partial elaborations, is the centerpiece of
Marx's work.
It is the basic work which permitted the generaliza-
tions in the famous Preface to the Critique of
Political
Economy. For Capital is only the
first of the six volumes
in which Marx wished to develop his Economics, the
title by which he referred to his
magnum opus on the
alienation of man
through Capital and the State.
The scope of the Grundrisse being wider than that
of
Capital, Marx's thought is best viewed as a con-
tinuing meditation on themes begun in
1844, the high
point in which meditation occurred in 1857-58. The
continuity
between the Manuscripts and the Grundrisse
is evident. Marx himself talked of the
Grundrisse as
“the result of fifteen
years of research, thus the best
period of my life.” This latter
was written in November
1858, exactly fifteen years after Marx's arrival in
Paris
in November 1843. He also says, in the Preface
of 1859:
“the total material lies before me in the form of mono-
graphs, which were written at widely
separated pe-
riods, for self-clarification, not
for publication, and
whose coherent elaboration according to the plan indi-
cated will depend on external
circumstances.” This can
only refer to the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and the
London notebooks of 1850-52.
Marx constantly used,
and at the same time revised, material from an
earlier
date: for instance, he used his notebooks of 1843-45
while
writing Capital.
The content of the Grundrisse only serves to confirm
what is plain from the external evidence: the beginning
of the chapter on
Capital reproduces almost word for
word the
passages in the Manuscripts on human need,
man as a
species-being, the individual as a social being,
the idea of nature as, in
a sense, man's body, the paral-
lels between
religious and economic alienation, the
utopian and almost millennial
elements, etc. One point
in particular emphasizes this continuity: the Grundrisse
are as Hegelian as the Paris Manuscripts and the central
concept of both of them is
alienation.
Aided by the publication of Marx's early writings,
the increasing complexity and anonymity of capitalist
society,
and the gap between ideology and reality in
many socialist ones, the
concept of alienation has be-
come very topical.
Its very topicality, however, is in
danger of rendering the concept of
alienation vacuous;
for often it seems merely to be used to designate
any
state of affairs that is considered unsatisfactory. How-
ever, Marx's description of alienation, particularly
as
contained in the Paris Manuscripts, is by no
means as
vacuous as many of its contemporary interpretations.
For it
contains both an account of the relationship
between socioeconomic
conditions and psychological
states that is, to some extent at least,
testable, and also
a far from vague view of human nature. Because it
contains both of these it is also a concept in which
facts and values are
inextricably bound together, and
so one which runs counter to the
prevailing demand
for a sharp distinction between evaluative and descrip-
tive statements. Thus, although Marx
was always writ-
ing with certain initial value
judgments presupposed,
empirical criteria are, up to a point, applicable to
his
hypotheses. Marx's concept can be further clarified by
asking what
he would consider as nonalienation. This
positive side of Marx's critique
is less well-known. But
the passage on “alienated
labour” in the Paris Manu-
scripts should be read in close conjunction with
his
description of “production in a human manner”
con-
tained in his notes on James Mill,
and with the concep-
tion of the future
communist society outlined in the
Grundrisse. The metaphysical and ethical elements of
the concept of alienation that originated with Hegel
and Feuerbach still
persist to some extent in Marx, but
they are given a socioeconomic context
that makes
them all the more interesting to the modern mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Guddat
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idem,
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Thought of Karl Marx (New York,
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Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1961).
DAVID McLELLAN
[See also Alienation in Western Theology; Economic His-
tory; Economic Theory of Natural Liberty;
Hegelian Politi-
cal and
Religious Ideas; Historical and Dialectical Materi-
alism; Marxism; Socialism.]