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DOI: 10.1177/0191453720931918
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neo-Hegelian Marxism?

Justin Evans
George Mason University, USA

Abstract
I suggest that we can read Marx in the light of recent analytic, neo-Hegelian thought. I summarize
the Pittsburgh School philosophers’ claims about the myth of the given, the claim that human
experience is conceptual all the way out, and that we live in a space of reasons. I show how Hegel
has been read in those terms, and then apply that reading of Hegel to Marx’s argument that capital
is akin to what Hegel called Geist, or spirit. We can understand capitalism as a space of reasons that
is contradictory: while the space of reasons is supposed to make human freedom possible, our
space of reasons makes freedom impossible. Reading Marx in this way is helpful, because it avoids
the flaws of analytical Marxism, existentialism and structuralism. However, it raises a large problem
of its own: Can the theory of the space of reasons be applied to a society that is not free of
alienation? I argue that it can, but only in ways that would not satisfy the analytic neo-Hegelians
themselves.

Keywords
alienation, capitalism, Hegel, John McDowell, Marx, Robert Brandom, Robert Pippin, space of
reasons, Terry Pinkard, Wilfrid Sellars

This article suggests one way of understanding Marxism in the light of recent scholarship
on Hegel. Paul Redding has described this scholarship as ‘analytic neo-Hegelianism’.1 It
is analytic, in that it is based in the tradition and problems of analytic philosophy,
particularly the thought of Wilfrid Sellars. It is neo-Hegelian, in that it takes seriously
Hegel’s responses to the problems of Kantian thought and applies them to the problems
of analytic philosophy.

Corresponding author:
Justin Evans, Philosophy Department, Robinson Hall B Room 465, George Mason University, 4400 University
Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA.
Email: evansjustindavid@gmail.com
2 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

The idea of relating analytic neo-Hegelianism to Marx could seem quixotic. Analytic
philosophy’s best known approach to Marx is analytical Marxism, which was deeply
suspicious of Hegel.2 It opposed both ‘so-called “dialectical” thinking’ and ‘“holistic”
thinking’.3 It rejected the claim that Marxism should have a unique method, and instead
used the methods of economic analysis, linguistic analysis and game theory. In line with
this, analytical Marxism accepted methodological atomism.4 Just as some analytic phi-
losophers wished to reduce all philosophy to science, analytical Marxism understood
Marxism as scientific socialism.5 Approaches to Marx that deviated from these outlines
were declared to be ‘bullshit’.6
These emphases are inverted in Hegelian Marxism. Lukács (1971, 1) wrote that
orthodoxy in Marxism ‘refers exclusively to method’. Hegelian Marxists generally
defend holism, as in Marcuse’s claim that for ‘Marx, as for Hegel, “the truth” lies only
in the whole, the “negative totality”’.7 And Hegelian Marxists are similarly keen on the
‘bullshit’ of the dialectic.8 Given this contrast between analytic Marxism and those
Marxists more sympathetic to Hegel, the prospects for bringing Marx together with
analytic philosophy and Hegel appear grim. And that is without noting the abrupt end
of Analytical Marxism; its members were rationally persuaded that their positions had
never been tenable.9
But the analytic thinkers I deal with here work far from analytical Marxism’s scient-
ism, atomism and empiricism. Sellars, ‘the egg from which this strange mutation of
“analytic Hegelianism” has started to hatch’, imagined a logical atomist calling his own
work ‘incipient Meditations Hegeliènnes’.10 John McDowell described his Mind and
World as ‘a prolegomenon to a reading of the Phenomenology’, and has since written
important papers on Hegel.11 McDowell’s turn to Hegel was influenced by the work of
Robert Brandom, whose Making it Explicit was described as ‘an attempt to usher analy-
tic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage’, by Richard Rorty (Redding 2010,
1). Brandom’s more recent work includes important essays on Hegel and a full retelling
of Hegel’s Phenomenology. And Hegel scholars, including Terry Pinkard, Robert Pippin
and Rocı́o Zambrana, have fruitfully engaged with this ‘Pittsburgh School’ of
philosophy.12
This analytic Hegel could be far more useful for Marxism than anti-Hegelian, analy-
tical Marxism was. The neo-Hegelians take Hegel seriously as a naturalistic, deflationary
thinker. They suggest that he is holistic because he seriously engaged with atomistic
thought, rather than claiming that his holism is an unwarranted assumption. They do not
necessarily make the dialectic simple to understand, but they do not simply dismiss it.
I begin with a brief survey of claims about the Hegel–Marx relationship; for the
purposes of this article, I will assume that Marx transcended Hegel in a positive manner.
I then describe the analytic neo-Hegelian thinkers’ basic philosophical claims, as well as
their interpretations of Hegel. There are important differences in the interpretations I
describe here, and fiery debates about almost all of the arguments I discuss in these
sections. I cannot do them any justice at all, but they have been described and criticized
by Tom Rockmore and others.13 Finally, I will suggest what analytic neo-Hegelian
Marxism could look like. The most important suggestion I have to make is that we can
see capitalism as what Sellars called a ‘space of reasons’,14 but a space of reasons which
– to revert to Hegelese – has failed to become adequate to its concept.
Evans 3

A developed analytic neo-Hegelian Marxism could avoid both the pitfalls of Analy-
tical Marxism and the problems of what Moishe Postone called ‘traditional Marxism’.
Traditional Marxisms look for a standpoint that we can use as a foundation to criticize
capitalism. One of the most prevalent is the idea that labour is what produces value in
capitalist society, but that labour is exploited. The solution to this exploitation is to take
the side of labour, which ‘provides a normative standpoint for a social critique in the
name of justice, reason, universality, and nature’ (Postone 2003, 65).15 Something sim-
ilar can be done with the forces of production, which, we might say, must be unfettered
from the relations of production that hold them back (Marx 1970, 21).16 More recent
post-Marxist thinking has attempted to do similar things. So, for instance, Habermas
sought a transcendental standpoint for critique in language (Habermas 1979, 177);
Honneth (2008[, 56) sought one in recognition; Jaeggi (2014, 34–37) sought it in the
possibility of proper appropriating of that which is alien to us. Analytic neo-Hegelian
Marxism would not seek an existing standpoint of critique in the present, because it
recognizes how deeply our social structures influence all human thought and action (cf.
Zambrana 2013). It suggests that any grounds for critique must be immanent to capit-
alism, but not identical with it, as in Jaeggi’s more recent work (2018).
The analytic neo-Hegelian reading of Marx could also avoid problems in sociological,
rather than critical, thought. Marxists are often caught up in the question of whether we
should see causal power primarily in individual human agents (Elster 1982), or in social
structures, as in Cohen’s functionalist Marxism (Cohen 1982).17 Although it is possible
to argue either position, the more convincing alternative is to find a theory that need not
give up on either individuals or structures, as in Bourdieu (1977), and analytic neo-
Hegelian Marxism offers resources for that kind of social theorizing. Another socio-
logical question that Marxists have struggled with is whether social structures or history
ought to be prioritized (e.g. see Schmidt 1983). Again, ideally, a Marxist theory will
make it possible to see structures historically. Although I cannot go into these debates in
detail here, it is clear that Hegel could offer important tools for sociological thinking of
this kind – provided Marxists can overcome their aversion to idealism of any kind.

Hegel and Marx

The literature on Marx’s relation to Hegel is as vast as the literature on Marx himself;
philosophers, critical theorists, social scientists, historians and revolutionaries have all
had something to say on the matter.18 But the argument can be seen as having a few
central, possible positions: that Marx rejected Hegelianism; that he fell back behind
Hegel; that his work mapped onto Hegel’s; or that he transcended Hegel in positive
ways. These positions can be combined with traditional or uncharitable interpretations of
the thinkers’ work (Hegel as the Pindar of Prussia; Marx as incipient Stalin), or with a
more charitable understanding. It is fruitful to take the more charitable reading of both,
and read Marx as transcending Hegel positively; I do not claim, however, that this is the
only correct way to understand the relationship.
Those Marxists who have taken the least charitable reading of Hegel have, reasonably
enough, argued that Marx rejected Hegelianism entirely. Althusser, for instance, sought
to show that ‘Marx’s discourse is in principle foreign to Hegel’s’.19 Similarly, Lucio
4 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

Colletti took Hegel to have ‘denied that things and the finite world have true reality’,
whereas Marx ‘upholds the process of reality’. In this sense, at least, Marx was more
Kantian than Hegelian.20
Those who take an especially charitable reading of Hegel, on the other hand, often see
Marx as falling back behind him. Gillian Rose criticized Marx for failing to develop a
logic, and instead giving us ‘an ambiguous dichotomy of activity/nature which relies on
a natural beginning and an utopian end’.21 Charles Taylor makes a similar move. He
reads Marx as accepting Hegel’s expressivism, the thought that ‘each individual . . . has
its own way of being human’, which is ‘internally generated’ and clarified in the process
of being expressed (Taylor 1975, 15–16). But Marx argued, in addition, that people in
class society ‘are not in control of their own expression’ (Taylor 1975, 549). For freedom
to emerge, society must be scientifically altered. Marx thus combined expressivism with
science, and reduced Hegel’s Geist to human species being. This gave Geist’s powers to
human beings, and made them promethean. Marx’s ‘conception of freedom as self-
creation [was] more radical than any previous one’, but its prometheanism made it
‘sterile and empty . . . in that it left us no reason to act in one way rather than another’
(Taylor 1975, 555–57.) In other words, Marx simply offers us what Hegel had already
criticized as absolute freedom (Hegel 1977, {{584ff.)
It is also possible to map Marx’s thought onto Hegel’s. This can be done uncharitably,
as in Karl Popper’s vituperative attack on their supposedly shared ‘historicism’.22 It can
also be done positively. Tony Smith has summed up the argument that ‘the homology
between Hegel’s Logic of the Concept and the logic of capital appears exact and com-
plete’, while also criticizing it.23 And Uchida’s extremely detailed exposition of how
Marx’s Grundrisse can be explained by reference to Hegel’s Logic is sympathetic to both
thinkers, but ultimately concludes that Marx attempted to ‘reform Hegel’s philosophy
using materialist aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy, in order to prove why and how
modern life is developed through the force of capital’ (Uchida 2015, 4).
This kind of mapping often leads to the stronger claim that Marx is a Hegelian who
transcended Hegel in a positive way. This can be combined with a traditional reading of
Hegel, as in Lukács, who nonetheless argued that ‘Marx never abandoned Hegel’s
philosophical method’.24 More recently, Chris Arthur describes his approach to Marx
as Hegelian, but also reads Hegel as an idealist of the British Idealist type, and ‘the
movement of the Logic [as] that of the self-acting Idea’. Nonetheless, Arthur sees ‘a
striking homology between the structure of Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital’. The
crucial difference between them is that Marx revealed the ideological nature of Hegel’s
thought. Thanks to Marx, we can see that Hegel ‘eternalises the dialectical movement of
capital by transforming it from an historically determinate system to the timeless realm
of logic’.25 So, Marx transcends Hegel by revealing that Hegel’s thought is most his-
torically specific precisely where Hegel thought that it was least so – in the categories of
the logic.26
Finally, one may see Marx as transcending Hegel, but with a more charitable reading
of the latter. Marcuse, for instance, read Marx as continuing Hegel’s work, ‘by driving
Reason itself to recognize the extent to which it is still unreasonable’ (Marcuse 1960,
xii–xiii). Tony Smith rejects the view of Hegel as apostrophizing ‘an alien Subject
greedily subsuming flesh-and-blood human beings to its alien ends’, and goes so far
Evans 5

as to suggest that Marx’s ‘thinking can legitimately be said to exemplify “absolute

thought” in Hegel’s sense of the term’ (Smith 2014, 25–26). Hegel did not recognize
that coercion characterized modern society; on his side, Marx failed to see how he could
have used Hegel’s Logic yet more effectively. But Smith sees Marx’s concept of capital
as an improvement on Hegel’s work (Smith 2014, 34–35).
This is the approach that I will take below: I will apply a very charitable reading of
Hegel to Marx’s thought. The charitable reading of Hegel is that of the Pittsburgh school
of thinkers, and those Hegel scholars who are in conversation with them. Unlike most of
those thinkers, I also read Marx charitably.27 Using the tools of the Pittsburgh school
gives us a philosophically interesting understanding of Marx’s relationship to Hegel,
and, more importantly, of Marx’s work itself.28

The Pittsburgh School

The central figures in the Pittsburgh School – Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom and John
McDowell – can perhaps best be understood as trying to show us what it means to be a
rational creature.29 Rationality is clearly tied to reasoning, and this leads to the long-
standing philosophical problem of knowledge. What justifies us in our claim to know
that, say, gin is a colourless beverage? The most straightforward response is to point to
some gin, and thus confirm our claim. The hope is that the thing we point to can found
our claim to knowledge without needing any further justification.
This raises what Sellars calls the myth of the given. Sellars lists possible candidates
for the given – ‘sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connec-
tions, first principles, even givenness itself’ – and charges that much traditional Western
philosophy includes some form of the myth (Sellars 1963, 127, §1). In each case,
philosophers seek some fact that (i) will be independent of ‘any other cognitive state’
but which will also (ii) provide justification for other cognitive states.30
Whatever we are using as the given must either be a concept or not a concept. Having
a concept – say, the concept of gin – means being able to make judgements with that
concept: I judge that this tumbler is filled with gin, while that one is (inexplicably,
repulsively) filled with vodka. For thinkers like Sellars, judgement is akin to drawing
inferences. If I have the concept of gin, I will be able to draw inferences about whatever
is in the tumbler of gin before me. That is, if I can correctly judge that the liquid is gin, I
can also infer that the liquid is alcoholic, transparent, viscous and so on. But in order to
draw those inferences, I must also have the concepts of alcohol, transparency, viscosity
and so forth. This leads Sellars to conclude that ‘there is an important sense in which one
has no concept pertaining to the observable properties of physical objects in Space and
Time unless one has them all – and, indeed, as we shall see, a great deal more besides’
(Sellars 1963, §19, 148).
But if one cannot have an individual concept without having more than that individual
concept, then a concept cannot fulfil one of the conditions of a given. No concept can be
independent of other cognitive states, because all concepts necessarily rely on other
concepts.
This suggests that if there is to be a given, it must be non-conceptual: so, instead of the
concept of gin, we might try to found knowledge on the immediate visual appearance of
6 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

colourless liquid. But this given would fail to fulfil the other condition of the given, that
it justify further cognitive states. This is because Sellars and those who follow him take
rationality (judgements, inferences, concept usage) to be normative, and not just causal.
Although the light bouncing off the tumbler will cause certain effects on my retina, and
they in turn will cause neurochemical effects and so on, none of these causal effects
suffices to produce thought. Thought is not merely causal – it is not what Brandom calls a
‘reliable differential response disposition’ (Brandom 2001, 38). For this reason, Sellars
claims, the attempt to analyse statements about knowledge into statements about non-
epistemic facts is ‘a radical mistake’.31
So, there can be neither a conceptual nor a non-conceptual given. But then, what does
our rationality involve? How do we know things? We seem to be thrown back on the
position that the external world cannot provide us with reasons at all, or that it cannot
constrain us (as if I could, Christlike, transform the water in my bottle into gin simply by
altering my concepts). John McDowell has argued that philosophers get caught in
this oscillation between appeals to the given and claims of coherentism (McDowell
1996, 8–9).
This argument can be applied to much Marxist materialism, even in its more sophis-
ticated forms. For instance, Lucio Colletti preferred Kant over Hegel because Kant
focused on providing an epistemological foundation for natural science. That foundation,
Colletti thought, could only be secured with a form of empiricism that was entirely free
of idealism (New Left Review 1978, 323–39). But the argument against the given makes
this kind of empiricism untenable, because such an empiricism relies on a given uncon-
taminated by conceptual thinking. If such a given cannot provide reasons, and cannot
constrain us, it cannot function as the materialists claim. So, Marxist materialism is
trapped in the oscillation McDowell identifies. That entrapment perhaps has its roots
in the tradition’s long, ill-considered resistance to idealism.32
The way out of this oscillation, the Pittsburgh school argues, is the idea of the space of
reasons. For Sellars, ‘empirical knowledge . . . is rational, not because it has a foundation
but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though
not all at once’ (Sellars 1963, §38, 170). We know something when we are able to place
it ‘in the logical space of reasons, the space of justifying and being able to justify what
one says’ (Sellars 1963, §36, 169). This is how we know things, and it is also an
explanation of what it means to be a rational creature: it is to live in the space of reasons.
How exactly does that work?33 For Sellars, one becomes a knower in a holistic way –
not by collecting empirical factoids, but by entering the space of reasons. Being a knower
is like being a basketball player: I am only the latter if I can do the right or wrong thing on
the court, and realize that I am doing it. If I just run around with the ball, and refuse to
dribble, and refuse to see that I am doing something wrong, it is not that I am playing
basketball poorly. Rather, I am not playing at all. Nor do I go from being a non-‘baller to
being a ‘baller in an instant. I gradually accumulate the habits and activities of a ‘baller
until I become someone who can be relied on not to throw the ball to the other team – or,
at least, not intentionally. For Sellars, this level of competence is tied to knowing that we
know. You are only a ‘baller if you know that you are a ‘baller. Accidentally scoring is
not really scoring at all.
Evans 7

Robert Brandom rejects Sellars’ claim that having knowledge requires us to know that
we have knowledge, and claims instead that ‘for S to know that P is for it to be
appropriate or correct for one to attribute belief in and justification for P to S, while
believing P oneself’ (Maher 2012, 92). This is tied up with Brandom’s inferentialism
(Brandom 1998, 2001). This theory explains that claims come to have meaning through
the game of asking for and giving reasons – a highly developed version, that is, of
Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’.34 On this
understanding, I know x – I have a justified true belief about x – when you are willing to
hold me to any inferences that knowing x makes necessary. If I know that I have drunk
too much gin, you will fairly easily dissuade me from driving home, by arguing that,
because I have drunk too much gin, I should not drive home. I will recognize and accept
the inference. If I do not accept that inference, then I do not really have a justified true
belief that I have drunk too much gin. This inferential approach to rationality commits
Brandom to a holistic understanding of human rationality – which is already implied in
Sellars’ phrase, ‘space of reasons’.35 So, despite their differences on the requirement of
self-reflexive knowing for knowledge, both Brandom and Sellars understand knowledge
as dynamic, rather than static, and as acquired holistically, but not in an instant.
John McDowell, on the other hand, argues that we can avoid the oscillation between
the myth of the given and coherentism by properly understanding human experience. We
appeal to the given because that is a model for how the external world can constrain our
thinking and our action. We appeal to coherentism because that theory makes it possible
to see how experience can give us reasons for action or thoughts, rather than simply
causing action or thought: a rise in temperature will cause a change in the mercury in an
old-fashioned thermometer; it will not give the mercury in a thermometer a reason to
expand as it will give me a reason to add ice cubes to my gin and tonic (McDowell 1996,
8n). We can properly understand human experience if we reject an assumption common
to both appeals to the given and to coherentism: the thought that human experience is
non-conceptual (Maher 2012, 97). Instead, we must understand that experience for
human beings is entirely conceptual: ‘conceptual capacities are already operative in the
deliverances of sensibility themselves’, or, in Aristotelian language (and, unintention-
ally, Hegelian Marxist language), ‘nature includes second nature’.36 Our experience just
can give us reasons, rather than simply cause our actions or thoughts. We have no reason
to deny that experience is conceptual all the way down – that is to say, no reason to deny
that we are rational creatures who inhabit the space of reasons. There can be no extra-
conceptual given, but nor is there any unbridgeable gap between our concepts and a
supposedly non-conceptual external world (McDowell 1996, 27).
Sellars, Brandom and McDowell each offer importantly different explanations of how
we can have knowledge without a given; each explanation doubles as an explanation of
life in the space of reasons. Sellars and Brandom offer pragmatist-like theories of the
growth of knowledge, with Brandom in particular developing a system that ties knowl-
edge and meaning to a social game of asking for and giving reasons. For Brandom, this is
what it means to have a concept – to be able to use it in that game. For McDowell, too,
having concepts and being a rational creature are tied to being in the space of reasons.
These arguments all work against traditional, materialist understandings of Marx’s work,
which would reject the importance of reasons and normativity entirely. But there is no
8 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

cause to think that that is an adequate understanding of Marx’s work. Even the early
writings, which are often thought as rejections of idealism – the Theses on Feuerbach,
the manuscripts collected in The German Ideology – can just as easily be seen as taking
over the Hegelian, idealist stress on spontaneity and autonomy (Moggach 2013, 96–97).

Neo-Hegelian Hegel: The given and Hegel’s idealism

In these terms, Hegel is no subjective idealist or Prussian apologist, and he is certainly
not trying to ‘restore the old pre-kantian metaphysics’, as Colletti suggested (New Left
Review 1978, 327). Instead, Hegel responds to Kant, while maintaining the latter’s
critical position with regard to rationalist metaphysics (Pippin 1989, 3ff.). This shift in
the understanding of the history of German idealism was central to the analytic neo-
Hegelian turn; McDowell, for instance, traced back to Kant the ‘rejection of the idea that
something is Given in experience’ (McDowell 1996, 135).
But if the problem of the given can be found in Kant, the solution to that problem may
not be. Hegel takes over from Kant’s work (i) the necessity of non-empirical conditions
of experience; (ii) the need to explain and justify those non-empirical conditions; and
(iii) the need to defend this idealism from other possible theories of experience. But,
Hegel argues, Kant cannot provide us with this theory. On the one hand, Kant made a
strong distinction between intuitions (which are given) and concepts (which are not).
Only with a strong distinction between them could Kant rely on the ‘pure intuitions’ of
space and time to explain experience, because he holds that those pure intuitions are not
at all conceptual. But, on the other hand, Kant’s thought also pushes us towards a
blurring of the distinction between intuitions and concepts. This blurring would make
such pure intuitions impossible.37 Seen in this light, the project of the post-Kantian
thinkers was to hold on to Kant’s transcendental turn, while avoiding the apparent
contradiction in his thinking.
Against this background, the early chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology are easy to
read as an attack on the myth of the given, and as a partial defence of idealism. The book
asks us to begin by considering how knowledge might be founded on an object that is
‘immediate or what simply is’ (Hegel 1977, 58). If it is immediate, it contains no input
from the knower. But each thing that we try to take as immediate in this way is quickly
shown to have input from the knower; ‘we find that neither one nor the other is only
immediately present in sense-certainty, but each is at the same time mediated’ through
something else – often enough, through the ‘I’ itself (Hegel 1977, 59). To use neo-
Hegelian language, the early chapters of the Phenomenology prove that there can be
no non-conceptual given.
These chapters can also be read as a critique of Kant’s apparently strict division
between concepts and intuitions.38 Hegel seems to insist that any good ‘epistemological
theory must treat not only appearance . . . but also reality . . . as conceptually articulated’
(Brandom 2019, 45). That is, the point of Hegel’s philosophy is to provide a coherent
account of human experience, and the world itself, as conceptual all the way out. This, in
turn, shows Hegel solving the problem of a priori intuitions. If Hegel can offer us an
idealist theory that does not even need a non-empirical given of this kind, he can escape
the problem that Kant could not: that what we take to be real objects are the ‘mere
Evans 9

reflections of an aspect of our subjectivity that we cannot understand’. Within Hegel’s

theory, objective reality really is there, but it does not ‘constitute an infringement on the
freedom of reason’, because the world is ‘the medium in which the freedom of reason is
exercised’ (McDowell 2003, 86–87).
The difficulty with this position is clear: Can we say that the world is conceptual all
the way out, but still say that reason is responsive to an external world? Might this not
just be coherentism? Brandom deals with this concern, in the first instance, by specifying
what a concept is for Hegel. A concept is not a mental particular, as in psychological
theories of conceptuality. If we claimed that everything is conceptual, and that concepts
are mental particulars, then we would be left with Berkeleyan idealism, ‘according to
which objective facts require a world-thinker whose thinkings they are’ (Brandom 2019,
55). But, instead, Hegel understands conceptuality as ‘standing to other such items in
relations of material incompatibility and consequence’ (Brandom 2019, 57). These
relations apply to the world itself as well as to logic. Being gin has as its consequence
being alcoholic, while being gin is materially incompatible with being an excessively
long commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology. In this sense, then, reality is conceptually
structured. But if the world itself is conceptually structured, then the world can have an
impact on our (equally) conceptually structured thinking. Berkeleyan idealism is
avoided, and the universality of conceptuality is retained.39

Neo-Hegelian Hegel: Freedom and alienation

This defence of idealism also lends weight to the thought that ‘the space of reasons is the
realm of freedom’, as McDowell puts it.40 For McDowell and Brandom, freedom just is
tied up with reason-giving – that is, with inhabiting the space of reasons, or being a
concept user.41 So it is possible to translate Hegel’s claim that ‘freedom belongs to the
concept’ (Hegel 1969, 582, translation altered) into the Sellarsian language of the space
of reasons, as Terry Pinkard does in his Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of
Reason. Pinkard describes Hegel’s Phenomenology as an account of Geist, which he
reads not as ‘a metaphysical entity but a fundamental relation among persons that mediates
their self-consciousness, a way in which people reflect on what they have come to take as
authoritative for themselves’ (Pinkard 1996, 9). What we take as authoritative – what we
take to be good reasons – depends on the social space that we inhabit; such social spaces
‘appear as both certain and as structuring what is to count as truth, and as necessary’
(Pinkard 1996, 8).
Once the argument against the given is concluded, then, the Phenomenology can go
on to show how European authoritative reason-giving practices (or our accounts of them)
have proved inadequate, and have come to be replaced by new, more adequate reason-
giving practices, including that of the Phenomenology itself. In Hegel, at least, the theory
of the space of reasons is historical. Nonetheless, this space of reasons is ‘not optional for
[modern Europeans,] but intrinsic to their sense of who they are’ (Pinkard 1996, 17). The
Phenomenology offers us a history, and a reflexive theory, of forms of social account-
giving. It formalizes the development of the modern European space of reasons, which,
for Hegel, is also the development of freedom.42
10 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

Robert Brandom’s reading of the Phenomenology also focuses on the story of free-
dom. For Brandom, Hegel is meant to have answered two different kinds of scepticism:
first, he offers us a semantic theory that explains how concepts come to have determinate
content (i.e. to explain why the concept of gin really does have a connection with one and
only one beverage); and, second, a pragmatic account of how norms can come to bind us.
The semantic theory is explained by the fact that concepts are linked by relations of
incompatibility and consequence. The pragmatic theory is a theory of social recognition
and score-keeping in the space of reasons. They are bound together by ‘an expressive
process of recollection’ (Brandom 2019, 636). This latter process, when complete, will
yield us genuine freedom.
That process takes place over what Brandom calls three ages of Geist. In the first, the
age of tragic heroism, the individual is forced to take responsibility for everything that
befalls them. So, Oedipus is responsible for killing his father and sleeping with his
mother. In the second age, that of modernity, I take responsibility only for that which
I specifically intend to do: here, Oedipus has done no wrong at all (Brandom 2019, 730).
In the third, postmodern age, the problems associated with the modern age are overcome
and we properly understand the nature of the space of reasons.
As Brandom sees it, the age of modernity is the age of alienation: for moderns, the
individual is understood as purely independent. Nobody else can have authority over her,
and she understands herself as not bound by any supra-individual norms. In other words,
modern individuals understand themselves as what Hegel called a Master (Hegel 1977,
111–19). The Master claims to be purely independent – to be unbound by any supra-
individual norms – and refuses to recognize others as persons. But such a Master is
impossible: personhood can only be held by those who are recognized by and recognize
others. And, because a person is only a person within the complex web of recognition,
each must take responsibility for the other. I am responsible for my deed; so is everyone
else. But taking responsibility in this way is only possible if we grasp that our norms and
our actions are reliant on our joint participation in the practice of reason-giving.
Hegel’s Phenomenology looks forward to the third age of Geist, the postmodern
heroic age, in which we are able to identify with the normative, reason-giving practices
of our societies; understand how those practices came to be; and recognize that these
practices are reasonable, rather than what Oedipus would have regarded as ‘blind fate’
(Brandom 2019, 755–57). We recognize our own involvement in our experience, and so
our responsibility for that experience – we reject the myth of a non-conceptual given –
and we recognize ourselves as free within the norms that we inhabit. At the same time,
we must recognize that our freedom is social, rather than absolute and individualistic, as
the Masters would have it be (Brandom 2019, 719). If we can accept that we are involved
in our own experience, and accept that our freedom is social, we will see that the space of
reasons is the fruit of our own actions, but that we are, nevertheless, bound by that space.
The phenomenology is a ‘semantics with an edifying intent’ – an attempt to overcome
the alienation of modernity (Brandom 2019, 636).
Similarly, Robert Pippin reads Hegel’s Logic as ‘an emancipatory logic’ (Pippin
2019, 24). Here, too, Hegel is understood as an anti-empiricist, who rejects ‘the possi-
bility of and so any foundational reliance on givenness’ (Pippin 2019, 12). The Logic is a
science ‘of ways of giving reasons in rendering anything genuinely or properly
Evans 11

intelligible’ (Pippin 2019, 14). It is not about individual concepts – the concept of gin, for
instance – but about conceptuality itself, the ‘rules for the possible empirical or practical
specification of any first-order conceptual discrimination, for what sorts of concepts of
objects there must be’ (Pippin 2019, 31). Even more so, it is about mistaken under-
standings of the ways we give reasons. Hegel diagnoses the problems of modernity by
claiming that ‘we have not properly understood how to understand ourselves and the
social and natural world in which we dwell’. But this failure is also our way out; ‘the
institutions of modern society, however limited and alienating, are also now the incipient
realization of human reason’ (Pippin 2019, 27).
The Logic, then, offers us the final and definitive rules for reason-giving. It is the
ultimate conclusion to any debates about what it means to live in the space of reasons,
and what it means to be a rational creature: ‘the concept, when it has progressed to a
concrete existence which is itself free, is none other than the “I” or pure self-conscious-
ness’ (Hegel 1969, 583; Pippin 2019, 104). The problems of human sociality remain to
be solved; ‘there are still two worlds in opposition, one a realm of subjectivity in the pure
spaces of transparent thought, the other a realm of objectivity in the element of an
externally manifold actuality, an impervious realm of darkness’ (Hegel 1969, 820;
Pippin 2019, 315). But our most basic logical categories can now be understood as
capable of truly determining objects. We really can have truth when we think; we really
can be in touch with reality. There is no need to hypothesize some gap between what we
experience and things in themselves. We can understand that ‘being is conceptuality, not
a material “made” intelligible by the exercise of a subjective power, as if intelligible only
“for us” . . . What a thing is, in truth, is its intelligibility, or the Concept with all that has
come to entail’ (Pippin 2019, 257). Or, to put it more briefly: logic is metaphysics. As in
Brandom, so for Pippin, an adequate account of account-giving leads to the incipient end
of alienation, and to the proper understanding of freedom as ‘a collectively achieved,
shared understanding . . . of one’s involvement with institutions and with others, gener-
ally described as being-with-self-in-others’ (Pippin 2019, 271).
But it is not exactly clear how this account of the space of reasons and rational
creatureliness meshes with Hegel’s knowledge that our society is not free of alienation.
Perhaps for this reason, Pinkard’s approach is more pessimistic. He argues that, for
Hegel, to be the kind of thing we are just is to be an ‘amphibian’, torn between the
world as it is, and the world of thought and freedom (Hegel 1975, 54). If this is so, the
best we can hope for is to live ‘reconciled to a world in which alienation and unintellig-
ibility on a personal level are maintained, yet in which there is good reason to believe
that this arrangement is, in principle, rational’ (Pinkard 2013a, 185). The only alterna-
tives would be the Romantic claim that the whole is bad, but the individual good (which
is theoretically impossible, given that the whole and the individual are so intimately
related), or ‘the imposition of a particular kind of wholeness on very dissimilar people’
(which is straightforward oppression) (Pinkard 2013a, 184–85). That is, we can hope
only for alienation, stupidity or Stalinism.
12 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

Analytic neo-Hegelian Marxism?

Most readings of Marx will reject that conclusion. The point just is to reveal the causes of
alienation and unfreedom, so that we can overcome them, without falling into Stalinism
or Romantic individualism – although Žižek or Laclau and Mouffe have seemed happy
to live in the antagonism or trauma of alienation (Žižek 1989, 5–6). Despite Pinkard’s
argument, analytic neo-Hegelian thought offers a path forward on this question. The best
way to see how is to ask what it means to say, as Moishe Postone does, that ‘Marx
describes his concept of capital in terms that clearly relate to Hegel’s concept of Geist’.43
As I suggested above, even those who read both Hegel and Marx sympathetically tend to
stress the divergences between them: Marx is the great materialist, Hegel his idealist
enemy. But reading Hegel as the Pittsburgh school does makes it possible to hold the two
thinkers more closely together, and to explain in much greater detail how capitalism and
spirit are related.
The claim that capital and spirit can be understood in similar terms is motivated by
Marx’s use of Hegelian terms in Capital’s chapter on the general formula. He says there
that ‘value’ becomes ‘an automatic subject’, or the ‘dominant subject’, and that it
‘presents itself as a self-moving substance’. This ‘value’ is capital (Marx 1990, 255–56).
So, capital fulfils Hegel’s suggestion that spirit is subject which is also substance
(Hegel 1977, §37, 21).
Marx’s claim comes towards the end of part 2. Part 1 is an analysis of commodities
and money, which can be read as ‘pure Ricardo’, with slight alterations (Harvey 2018a,
kindle loc. 471). But when read from a neo-Hegelian position, we can see it as an
Hegelian interrogation of the concepts of commodity and money: not a history of how
money comes to be, and not a materialist account of everyday economic transactions, but
an attempt to explain how money and economic transactions are even possible to begin
with – an identification of the space of reasons that we occupy when engaged in eco-
nomic behaviour.
So, Marx argues that a commodity must be both an object and a bearer of value. The
concept of commodity differs from the concept of object, in that there is nothing in the
concept of object that licenses us to infer from it anything about economics or exchange
relationships; but if some given thing is a commodity, we can infer that it is also
exchangeable. In order to be exchangeable, though, Marx claims that the commodity
must be ‘equal to a third thing’, which is neither of the two objects being offered in the
exchange.44 This third thing is ‘value’ – not exchange value, which is the ‘form of
appearance’ of value, but value in itself. Value is that which makes exchange possible.
The concept of object does not involve the concept of value, but the concept of com-
modity does: we can truly infer of any object that is a commodity, that it has value.
Marx then asks why some things are understood as commodities, while others are
understood as objects – that is, he tries to specify further the concept of commodity in
contradistinction to that of object. His answer is that commodities are things that have
been laboured on; all commodities are ‘expressions of an identical social substance,
human labour . . . their objective character as values is therefore purely social’ (Marx
1990, 138). This, then, is a further inference that we are licensed to draw with regard to
commodities: if x is a commodity, it is also a product of human labour. And, indeed, it is
Evans 13

hard to see how anything could be a commodity that was not a product of human labour,
provided the latter is given a suitably broad meaning. A share in a company is a com-
modity, and it is literally created by human labour. An apple can be a commodity, if the
person picking it is doing so for a wage, or in the expectation of profit. If, however, my
2-year-old daughter picks an apple from the apple tree in our backyard, that apple will
not be a commodity – because she is not labouring, but playing.45
Following this analysis of the concept of commodity, Marx asks what forms value can
take and concludes that the most adequate form of value is money. For this reason, ‘the
simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money-form’ (Marx 1990, 163).
This does not mean that commodities historically precede money. Rather, it a quasi-
Hegelian demonstration. The analysis of the concept of the commodity necessarily leads
us to the concept of money. We cannot understand the former without understanding the
latter, nor the latter without the former. They are tied by chains of inference.
But if the concept of commodity requires the concept of money, it also requires us to
consider the concept of exchange – since exchangeability is a necessary feature of the
commodity. Marx analyses the most familiar form of exchange as C-M-C: the creation of
a Commodity, which is then sold for Money, which is then used to buy a second
Commodity. However, the point of analysing the concept of the commodity was to
explain the concept of capital, and we cannot understand the concept of capital by
thinking of exchange in these terms. Nothing is accumulated in the C-M-C exchange,
and, whatever else it is, capital is accumulated goods. We will only understand the
concept of capital if we consider a second possible form of exchange.
Using the terms of the first form of exchange, we can understand this second form:
M-C-M, using Money to buy a Commodity, which is then sold for Money (Marx 1990,
248). But to do that would be ridiculous; why buy a commodity and then sell the com-
modity for the same amount of money? The reason this form of exchange occurs is that
‘more money is finally withdrawn from circulation than was thrown into it at the begin-
ning’ (Marx 1990, 251). This is what we see with capital: the creation of new value, here,
in the form of money. This new value is not any different from the value at the start; they
are both money (whereas in C-M-C, the commodities must be different for the exchange to
make any sense). But the quantity of money has altered. So, this cycle can, in theory,
continue uninterrupted: M-C-M0 -C-M00 -C-M000 and so on. Both money and the commodity
are forms of value, so we could also rewrite the cycle as V-V-V0 -V0 -V00 -V00 -V000 and so on.
This is why Marx calls value the automatic subject. It appears to be a fully independent,
self-increasing system.46 It is also the self-moving substance. There can be little doubt that
Marx is mocking Hegel. At the same time, his use of this rhetoric brings the horror of
capitalism home, because it shows such a stark contrast to German Idealism’s insistence on
the nature of modern subjectivity and freedom.
To move even further into the language I have been using here, if capital is the subject
that is also substance – that is, Geist – and if Geist is a set of concepts that we can
imagine as a space of reasons, we can claim that a society structured by the economic
demands of capital is a space of reasons. ‘Commodity’ is not a transhistorically or
transcendentally necessary concept; rather, Marx’s presentation suggests that the differ-
entiation of that concept from the concept of object is a crucial aspect of capitalist
society, because the concept of commodity is entangled with the concept of value. His
14 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

analysis of the concept of commodity, and in turn of the concept of value, reveals to us
the necessary concepts for the capitalist space of reasons – just as an analysis of the
concept of being in Hegel’s Logic is supposed to reveal to us the necessary concepts for
the space of reasons.
But there is a crucial difference between the space of reasons that we see in Hegel and
the space of reasons that we see in Marx. While the former is meant to yield freedom, the
latter does not. Marx’s picture of the capitalist is an image of an unfree life; ‘the
objective content of the circulation we have been discussing . . . is [the capitalist’s] sub-
jective purpose’. The capitalist, provided he is driven by the creation of value, is ‘capital
personified and endowed with consciousness and a will’. He is a ‘rational miser’, whose
entire life is driven by the need to invest money with the aim of attaining more of it
(Marx 1990, 254). In the capitalist, the subject is substance in a second way, because we
can make no distinction between the society and the individual. And, of course, the
labourer is no more free than the capitalist.47 Capitalism is a space of reasons, but one in
which ‘the modern individual is historically constituted [as] a person independent of
personal relations of domination, obligation, and dependence . . . and so, in a sense, self-
determining’; at the same time, this self-determining individual is ‘confronted by a social
universe of abstract objective constraints that function in a lawlike fashion’ (Postone
2003, 163). The contradiction of capitalism, then, is not just the economic facts that
capitalists take more product than they have paid for, or that capitalism produces great
wealth and distributes it poorly, or that the bourgeoisie was creating its own grave-
diggers (Sunkara 2019, 27, 43). The contradiction of capitalism is that freedom is denied
to us by the very space of reasons that is supposed to make freedom possible.
So, we can understand Marx as answering the problem raised by the Pittsburgh
school’s reading of Hegel: If modernity is a fully formed space of reasons, and the space
of reasons is meant to be how human beings are capable of some kind of freedom, why
are we still alienated? Why are we still unfree? The answer is that our space of reasons is
a capitalist one. One particular concept – value – has come to play an outsized role in our
games of asking for and giving reasons. It has taken on an excessive importance in our
chains of reasoning. Our deeds or thoughts are predominantly justified by the normative
concept of value. Where should we live? What labour should I perform? What major
should I choose? What school should my children go to? In each case, the ultimate
justification or reason will be economic. Whether we are making decisions, or justifying
them, our space of reasons herds us towards the concept of value. At the same time, the
movements of value itself are independent of individuals: they are not the result of
properly considered choices, but of a mysterious process that we cannot understand.48
On this interpretation, it is hardly surprising that individuals cannot identify with their
social norms, as Brandom believes we must. Our dominant social norm will always
appear to be a constraint on our desires, whether those be individual (I would like to
drink more red Burgundy, but I cannot afford to – which is weird, if you take a step back
from ordinary life) or collective (we would like to shift immediately to a low-carbon
economy, but we cannot afford to – which is even weirder). To put it in the post-
Wittgensteinian terms that Brandom sometimes uses, capitalism is a game, but one
whose rules make the players’ preferred outcomes impossible. It is a game whose rules
Evans 15

ensure that nobody can win. Those rules also ensure that the game cannot end. It is a
game that is not a game.
But this need not leave us with the dispiriting alternatives that Pinkard’s Hegel would
offer. When a space of reasons harbours a blatant contradiction or inadequacy, it changes
– this is the lesson of the Phenomenology. Although the Logic is meant to offer us a
coherent picture of what Hegel calls the concept, and although this implies that our
concept is coherent, we may well want to say that the space of reasons we happen to live
in harbours its own contradiction: in this case, that the concept, which is meant to
constitute our individual selves as free creatures, in fact denies to us the freedom that
a coherent space of reasons will offer. A theory based on this understanding would not be
a Romantic demand for the individual to stand against The System, because it sees that
our individuality is a product of that system; we are no less contradictory than the space
of reasons we inhabit. And, far from being a Stalinist demand that ‘difference’ submit to
a monotonous whole, this theory suggests that difference is already subsumed by a
monotonous whole, fixated on the normative force of value. And this theory continues
to demand an end to alienation, rather than a resigned acceptance of human suffering. All
of these things can be done in the same terms that some analytic neo-Hegelians use to
affirm the present.

Benefits and issues

There are benefits to thinking about Marx in this way. Most straightforwardly, once one
understands Hegel’s thinking as naturalistic and materialistic, one can put to rest all the
concerns about turning Marx into a Berkeleyan idealist.49 The language of the space of
reasons does not require us to imagine capitalism as a spooky world spirit mysteriously
creating the world out of nothing. Rather, it gives us a straightforward way to think
through and understand everyday interactions between individuals, and how those inter-
actions are constrained by the way that we justify or decide upon our actions. That is,
Marx helps us to think about human practices of giving and asking for reasons. So, this
reading of Marx seems to retain the benefit of analytic Marxism: it lets us translate
Marx’s own Hegelian language into a more grounded jargon. But it avoids the earlier
tradition’s flaws, because it allows us to think socially. Just as Marx insisted that the
concept of value only exists in a society (because it only makes sense within a structure
of commodity exchange), the space of reasons requires the giving of and asking for
reasons within a society.
This reading also avoids the problems of excessive objectivism, in which human
subjectivity is merely an epiphenomenon to be explained away, or an ideological residue
to be ruthlessly criticized – the kind of thing one might get in some versions of Althus-
ser’s thinking (Schmidt 1983, 3n), or of Foucault’s. For this theory, there is no need to
posit an independent structure (as when I, as a quasi-Foucauldian undergrad, used to
claim that ‘power’ creates everything and the subject does not exist), because the space
of reasons is understood to have developed throughout history in response to both human
action and the content of the concepts themselves.50 At the same time, we need not fall
back towards the idea of radically independent subjects, as in Sartre’s most careless
statements about ‘man’ being ‘that which he wills himself to be’ (Sartre 2007, 22). For
16 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

this reading of Marx, human freedom – which just would be the result of inhabiting a
coherent space of reasons – could only be a result of historical development, starting
from the human being as a natural, desiring creature. The I is as free as the space of
reasons that it inhabits allows it to be.
This Marx could also be a resource for what Rahel Jaeggi calls ‘a wide concept of
economy’, in which the economic is a bundle of practices within a larger bundle of
practices, the form of life, but a set of practices that constitute ‘its own, new normativity’
in capitalist societies (Jaeggi 2017, 176). Jaeggi’s concept of the economy improves on
Habermas’ social theory, because he segregated the economic system from the lifeworld,
and so removed the economic sphere from ‘the realm of criticism’ (Jaeggi 2017, 161).
This theory also allows us to specify what alienation is, and to see how it is related to
the contradiction of capitalism. Alienation, as it is discussed in Capital, is the position of
living human beings whose subjective attributes are exercised by the objective social
structure that they have created. We are not able to decide where the game of reason-
giving ends, because the game of reason-giving always ends with value. Only a differ-
ence in the game – a transformation of the space of reasons itself – would alter that state
of affairs. This helps us to explain the contradiction: the development of a coherent space
of reasons is a good thing, because it would make human freedom possible. As Marx
wrote, ‘freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the asso-
ciated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it
under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’ (Marx
1991, 959). If our space of reasons is created by us, but our practices of reason-giving are
forcing us towards actions that we would otherwise reject, and that are not necessary for
our survival, then that space of reasons contradicts its own purpose. Our reasoning
should lead us to what we can rationally, collectively want, if our reasoning is to be
understood as free in any meaningful sense.
The use of this language and these ideas in a Marxist context runs into problems, of
course. The most obvious is that most of the Pittsburgh neo-Hegelians want to defend
Hegel as having gotten it right, not just for his own time, but in general. For Brandom,
Hegel seems to have at least seen the horizon on which we will enter an heroic, post-
modern understanding of agency. His rhetoric on this point hovers between socialism
and Christianity: we must all take responsibility for each other; we must all forgive one
another. For Pippin, Hegel’s Logic brings to a conclusion some of the major debates in
Western philosophy: How is the world, in general? And what must it be, for us to think
about the world, in general? The Logic makes it possible for us to engage in philosophy
about something other than philosophy, safe in the knowledge that philosophy has a firm
logical/metaphysical foundation. That foundation is something like a coherent space of
reasons, which is not based on ‘empiricism, dogmatic rationalism, reductionism, scient-
ism, consequentialism, moralism’ (Pippin 2019, 319). Much the same can be said for
Pinkard.
But this argument can only work if Hegel’s space of reasons is the final one. If Hegel
has not understood and explained the actual, necessary structure of reality and reason,
then the foundation is not secure. The foundations are equally unstable if we say that
Hegel has provided us with an understanding of one coherent space of reasons: if there
could be more than one, we run into the problems of conceptual scheme dualism, the idea
Evans 17

that we are applying concepts to an otherwise independent material reality.51 That leads
quickly to relativism, and, in any case, it is probably incoherent to think that there could
be a conceptual scheme that we could apply to an independent reality in that manner
(Davidson 1973–1974). To claim that we impose a conceptual scheme on some inde-
pendent object is to fall prey to the myth of the given.
But to discuss capitalism as a space of reasons does imply that our space of reasons is
neither coherent nor final – and thus that it does not offer a strong foundation for
continuing philosophical discussion. If we cannot subscribe to the idea of a conceptual
scheme dualism (according to which we are somehow falsely conceptualizing things as
commodities when they are mere objects), and if our space of reasons really has not
yielded the freedom that rationality is meant to give us (as Pinkard and Brandom and
Pippin all, in their own ways, seem to admit), then Hegel might be said to be straight-
forwardly wrong, and the whole project collapses.
So, how can we describe the obvious fact of alienation and the absence of freedom,
while holding on to the very useful language of the space of reasons? For the neo-
Hegelians, Hegel has solved the problem of knowledge. He has properly and adequately
described human self-consciousness, without giving in to mystical talk about souls and
so on; he has also shown how we, as self-conscious creatures, can come to have knowl-
edge of what is not ourselves. On the other hand, Hegel has manifestly not solved the
problem of alienation, which either remains with us or will forever remain with us. The
problem of knowledge is solved, but we will never be reconciled to our condition as
knowers. To oversimplify: we do not know everything, but we can know everything; we
are not at home in this society, and we cannot be at home in any society. But it is a
strange claim indeed to say that everything is, in principle, knowable – except the
conditions that would make our society functional.
There seem to be some alternative solutions to this impasse. We might claim that
Hegel was properly pointing forward to the possibility of a coherent space of reasons,
and that he was simply mistaken if he thought he had provided one. Or, we can suggest
that Hegel did provide a coherent space of reasons, but failed to recognize that he was not
discussing what he would call the actual space of reasons. These both rely on denying the
completion of the project. Perhaps, instead, we could say that the development of value
as a central concept in our space of reasons leaves the basic structure of that space
untouched. Then, the problem would not be with our logic at all. But this final option
leads us directly back to the strange claim that the problems of knowledge and of self-
hood have been solved, but not the problem of alienation.52
Marx – and Marxists – will find this claim either contradictory (if we can know
everything in principle, one of the things we can know is what an unalienated society
would look like) or intolerable (we can know everything, and we can know that immense
suffering is inevitable). A Marxist would make the contrary claim: if the route to recon-
ciliation has not been discovered, then the knowledge problem cannot have been solved.
To argue that the problem of knowledge is solved, but alienation remains, is simply a
mistake. Either Hegel could not complete the system (because the problem of knowledge
cannot have been solved if the most important thing we can know remains unknowable),
or Hegel is open to straightforward ideology critique. On this reading, Hegel does
accurately represent the foundations of our knowledge, as he found them; and he
18 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

accurately represents our ongoing alienation. His mistake is to affirm them both as
necessary. Instead, he should have admitted their incoherence and argued that knowl-
edge will only be well founded when the social conditions for knowledge are in place.
The foundations can neither be final, nor properly known, if alienation remains. This
suggests a reformulation of Adorno’s claim: there is no knowledge in false life (Adorno
1994, §18, 42).

ORCID iD
Justin Evans https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2407-1482

Notes
1. Redding (2011). Everything I say here is also indebted to Redding (2007).
2. Although after G. A. Cohen had rejected Marxism, he was more willing to read Hegelian
influence into it. In Cohen (2001), he argued that Marx took the obstetric motif from Hegel’s
criticism of mathematics, while insisting that ‘the obstetric conception of political practice is
patently false’, 58–75.
3. Cohen (2000, xvii). For a fuller criticism of analytical Marxism, see Furner (2018, 60–84). He
argues that Analytical Marxism failed not because it was Marxist (as Cohen argued), but
because of its own analytical constraints, 484–86. See also Roberts (1997).
4. Cohen (2000, xviii, xxiii). Elster (1985) argued that Marx ‘was well aware’ of the advantages
of atomistic economic modelling of the game theory type, ‘although his Hegelian training
sometimes led him astray’, and that this kind of atomistic modelling helped him avoid ‘the trap
of premature totalization which from Lukacs onward has plagued Western Marxism’, 121–22.
5. On science and analytic philosophy, see Stroll (2000, 1–2). For Analytic Marxism and sci-
entific socialism, see Cohen (2000, xxvii).
6. Cohen (2000, xxiv–xxv). Thinkers in the analytic tradition have often seen Hegel as a ratio-
nalistic pantheist, for whom everything boils down to whether we are interpreting the world
correctly; for example, Wood (2004, 10–11). Anglophone thinkers outside of philosophy have
been equally unwilling to take Marx’s Hegelianism seriously. Harvey hardly mentioned Hegel
in his Limits to Capital, (Harvey 2018b). In his more recent Companion, Harvey finds Hegel
more important, but still prefers to read Marx through, for instance, Deleuze, (Harvey 2018a,
kindle loc. 3585).
7. Marcuse (1960, 313). Jay (1984, 128) suggests that Korsch, Bloch, Gramsci and Lukács all
accepted holism, though in importantly different ways. Bartonek (2018) shows Korsch’s
investment in dialectics and argues against those who see him as mostly critical of Hegel.
8. Adorno (2017) is an extremely sympathetic presentation of dialectics in Hegel, including
Adorno’s reports on his attempt to introduce ‘dialectical consideration into the supposedly
spontaneous running of the sciences’ in America, and his claim that ‘the transition to dialec-
tical thought is necessarily implicit in every so-called positivistic investigation’, 123–24.
9. The end was explicitly announced in Cohen (1995, 6).
10. Redding (2010); Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, §20, in Sellars
(1963). This is despite Sellars’ sometime distaste for Hegel, as in Redding (2007, 26). Com-
pare Giladi and Sachs (2019), and the articles in that dedicated volume.
11. McDowell (1996, ix). For a summary of McDowell’s work on Hegel, see Sanguinetti and
Abath (2018, 1–26), as well as the papers collected there.
Evans 19

12. See Pinkard (2013a), which engages with Brandom and McDowell; Pippin (2005, 2007,
2019), especially 161–74, on Brandom, and 46–47, on McDowell; and Zambrana (2015, 7–
10), on Brandom’s Hegel and its relation to more deconstructive interpretations.
13. Rockmore (2005). He carefully distinguishes between Brandom and McDowell on Hegel,
while arguing that neither of them can deal with Hegel properly, because they are committed
to ‘metaphysical realism’, 155–56; see also his immensely helpful 100–155 in general. Bran-
dom (2019) describes Hegel as holding to conceptual realism (54), objective idealism (205)
and conceptual idealism (369), which seems to at least be a start towards something more like
Rockmore’s preferred reading of Hegel as an empirical realist. For another way to understand
the differences between the figures I discuss here, see Midtgarden (2013), or the works of
Redding and Maher (2012) that I describe below.
14. For instance, Sellars (1963, §36, 169). As I will discuss below, for Sellars and the analytic neo-
Hegelians, it is the space of reasons, not something that can any longer be altered in history.
15. For example, Cole (1964) argued that ‘the whole Marxian theory of value, stripped of its
Ricardian trappings . . . amounts to the very simple assertion that under capitalism the owning
classes appropriate a part of the product of industry and agriculture without working for it’,
287.
16. Cohen (2000) is largely an extended philosophical commentary on this passage of Marx’s.
17. As Kołakowski (2008, 278) points out, this debate was already underway in the 19th century,
because historical materialism was seen to deny ‘the significance of conscious human action
in history’ and to treat ‘religion, thought, feeling, etc. either as unimportant or as determined
by economics to the exclusion of human freedom’. As he shows, these objections were mostly
beside the point.
18. One helpful distillation is Burns and Fraser’s ‘Introduction’ (2000, 1–33).
19. Althusser et al. (2015, 51–54). Schroeder (2019) suggests that Althusser identified ‘every
aspect of Marxism that Stalinism had elevated to “orthodox” Marxism with Hegel’.
20. Colletti (1973, 7, 121, 122). For a more recent attempt to eject Hegel from Marx’s thought, see
Rosenthal (1998).
21. Rose (2009, 231). Moggach (2018) likewise sees Marx as a powerful thinker whose best
thoughts ‘derive primarily from what Marx retained of idealism; and his defects derive from
how he deviates from it’.
22. Popper (2011). For instance, he demands that the reader not take Hegel seriously at all,
because it is just ‘bombastic and mystifying cant’, 243; because he was nothing more than
the ‘first official philosopher of Prussianism’, 244; his ‘hysterical historicism is still the
fertilizer to which modern totalitarianism owes its rapid growth’, 270. Marx was less repulsive
to Popper, but only just; he is, ultimately, ‘responsible for the devastating influence of the
historicist method of thought within the ranks of those who wish to advance the cause of the
open society’, 294.
23. Smith (2014, 17–40), quote from 23–24; further argument 35ff. Also see Bellofiore (2014).
24. Lukács (1971, 34). For a comparison, see Postone (2009).
25. Arthur (2004, 7). This is similar to the position of the German Neue Marx-Lektüre readings.
See the brief outline in Bellofiore and Riva (2015).
26. Rockmore (2002) makes a similar claim for Hegel’s social and political thought. He argues
that Hegel had ‘no general theory of the modern world’, and so could not see how capitalist
modernity caused poverty and alienation. Marx corrected those errors. He was ‘in many ways
20 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

a Hegelian, in fact Hegel’s most profound student’, 204–5. But against this claim, see Pippin’s
(1997) argument that Hegel ‘was the first philosopher to make modernity itself a philosophical
problem’, 19, and Zambrana’s (2015) still stronger case for the robustness of Hegel on
modernism.
27. For a rare engagement with Marx, see Pinkard (2013b). Pinkard argues there that Marx’s
philosophy of action and his naturalism are flawed, and that his thought is problematically
perfectionist. The volume was reviewed in English by Blumenfeld (2018). Zambrana (2018),
on the other hand, offers a more charitable reading of Marx from a neo-Hegelian background,
showing the importance of Hegel’s account of modality for Marx’s work. Others have
approached Pittsburgh school theorists with critical theory in mind: Vogelmann (2019) help-
fully criticizes Brandom’s under-theorized use of the concept of ‘responsibility’, from a
critical theory perspective, while Sachs (2015) compared Adorno’s and McDowell’s inter-
pretations of Hegel, and the effects of those interpretations on their conclusions about the
possibility of knowledge.
28. A charitable, Hegelian, analytic approach to Marx can also be found in Michael Quante’s
work, which is slightly to one side of the debates I am dealing with here. To date, Quante has
focused on the relationship between Hegel’s and Marx’s use of recognition, about which I will
have little to say specifically. See Quante (2010a, 2010b, 2011) and especially Quante (2013),
where he argues for the importance of recognition as a theme in Marx’s thought in general, and
shows how this could be used to refute the claim that Marx can be reduced to a non-normative
science.
29. My brief explanation is of course simplified and selective. For a short introduction, see Lance
(2008). For an excellent, accessible, full treatment, see Maher (2012).
30. DeVries (2014, 98–99); Maher (2012) uses deVries’ formulations, as well. For Sellars’ own,
less graceful expression, see Sellars (1963, §32, 164).
31. Sellars (1963, §5, 131). He likens this mistake to the naturalistic fallacy in ethics, that is, the
reduction of claims about morality, or what we say we ought to do, to claims about what is.
Just as normative claims about what we ought to do – for instance, do not murder – cannot be
justified by appeal to non-normative, existing human behaviour, so epistemic claims cannot be
justified by appeal to non-normative, causative states of affairs.
32. For the muddled origins of Marxism’s resistance to idealism, see Stedman Jones (2016, 191–
94). For a more positive view of Marx and idealism, see Moggach (2013), who adds a short
coda outlining the ‘marginalising or repudiation of spontaneity in favour of scientistic
accounts of history and agency’ in the 20th century.
33. For what follows, see Maher (2012, 87ff.).
34. Wittgenstein (1997, §43, 20). On Brandom and games, see, for example, Brandom (2010,
173).
35. For an outline of Brandom’s view, see Brandom (2001, 15–16); for his response to critics, see
Brandom (2010, 168–74).
36. McDowell (1996, 39, xx). See, for instance, Adorno (1984). Testa (2007) has worked with
both McDowell’s use of the term and Adorno’s.
37. Pippin (1989, 37–38). For pure intuitions, see Kant (1998, 173).
38. There is a wide debate about the accuracy of Hegel’s interpretation of Kant on this point. As
Pippin (1989) points out, ‘Hegel nowhere provides an adequate justification for his numerous
critical remarks about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason’, 11. McDowell (2003) argues that Kant
Evans 21

does not rely on any empirical given, but does rely on a transcendental given. Bird (1996)
addressed McDowell’s earlier reading of Kant. McDowell (2003) responds to Bird, and to
Henry Allison’s criticism of Mind and World’s reading of Kant, 87–88.
39. McDowell (1996) pictures the universality of conceptuality differently. He aligns concep-
tuality with spontaneity, in the Kantian sense, and then argues that we have ‘perceptual
sensitivity to features of our environment, but we have it in a special form’. Our perceptions
are ‘taken up into the ambit of the faculty of spontaneity’, 64. Thus, all perception is always
already conceptual, and there is no gap between mind and world.
40. McDowell (1996, 5). McDowell explicitly links this claim to Kant’s thinking on spontaneity
and conceptuality, which Hegel developed at great length.
41. For instance, McDowell (2009). McDowell rejects the identity of recognitive status and free
agency that other readers of Hegel have put forward, because ‘we can respect a constitutive
connection between the status and a possibility of its being acknowledged, without needing to
accept that it is conferred by acknowledgment – that one has it by being taken to have it’, 169.
42. Pinkard is rightly careful with his adjectives here, though Hegel does seem to have thought
that he was giving an account of the development of the only space of reasons.
43. Postone (2003, 75). For an almost identical claim, see Bellofiore and Riva (2015), quoting
Helmut Reichelt, 28.
44. Marx (1990, 127). The ‘third thing’ should, perhaps, recall Kant’s description of the trans-
cendental schema as ‘a third thing’ that is intellectual on the one hand and sensible on the
other’, and so makes it possible to apply categories to appearances. Kant (1998, 272 (B177)).
45. On this, see Marx (1990, 153–54). Strictly speaking, she is playing make believe, because we
(sadly) do not have an apple tree in our backyard.
46. Capital is also a critique of this appearance, so the book continues by asking how it is possible
to increase value in this way. Economic exchange cannot be the source of increasing value,
because basic rationality tells me not to exchange my greater value for your lesser value. The
answer to the problem is, of course, that human labour power is the commodity in the M-C-M0
cycle. This is already implicit in the concept of the commodity that Marx outlined earlier; a
commodity is the product of human labour. Here, we see that the concept of commodity and
the concept of labour power must be even more strongly related: in capitalism, human labour
power just is the production of commodities (i.e. what will sell, rather than what is required).
Human labour power is thus the commodity that ‘creates’ value. Capital, despite appearances,
cannot independently create value. Eventually, though, human labour power will be shown to
be itself an element of capital, and the circle will be squared. See Postone (2003, 283–84) on
this process of ‘real subsumption’.
47. Compare Ludwig van Mises’ similar claim that ‘the market controls [the entrepreneur] more
strictly and exactingly than could any government’, and ‘as producer . . . a man is merely the
agent of the community and as such has to obey’, quoted in Slobodian (2018, 107–8).
48. Slobodian (2018) argues that some neoliberal theorists understood and valued this about the
modern economy; they saw it as ‘sublime, beyond representation and quantification’, 18.
49. Brandom (2019) finds the roots of reason and normativity ‘in the sort of primitive awareness
afforded already to organic creatures in virtue of their nature as desiring beings’, 262. As for
Marxists, Roy Bhaskar, in his entry, ‘Idealism’, in Bottomore (1991, 247), frets that Western
Marxism ‘has often tended towards some form or other of epistemological idealism’, without
explaining why that would be so bad.
22 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)

50. On this, see Postone (2003, 42), who compares Marx to Bourdieu’s similar attempt to over-
come the tension between methodological individualism and functionalism in Outline of a
Theory of Practice. One example of this debate can be found in Giddens (1982), and the papers
from that volume of the journal to which he responds.
51. See Arthur’s (2004) claim that Hegel took the historical movement of capital as a timeless
movement of logic, 7.
52. This solution also raises problems like those discussed in Zambrana (2013), who shows the
futility of trying to find some normative ground of critique that is entirely insulated from
‘capitalist resignification’, 105. If recognition cannot function as an insulated norm, then it
seems fair to say that the space of reasons cannot be free from distortion.

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