From Social Anthropology to the Historical Dialectic of Labor

This chapter examines the transition from Hegel’s philosophy of history to nineteenth-century political liberalism and its consequent critique by Karl Marx and Moses Hess. We discuss the disintegration of the Hegelian school, starting with a landmark theological critique of David Strauss and proceeding to the Fichteanized historical dialectic of Bruno Bauer, the liberal politics of Arnold Ruge, and the anthropocentric inversion of Hegel by Ludwig Feuerbach. The tension between the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment and Hegel’s historical conservatism is conceptualized by the Young Hegelians as a contradiction between the open-ended nature of his revolutionary dialectical method vs. a close-ended structure of the speculative system and conception of history. The deconstruction of Hegelian philosophy, sharpened by Hess and the founders of Marxism, culminates in the theory of socialism and shapes Marx’s conception of labor as a universal form of human activity and a principal instrument of socioeconomic emancipation.