Capitalism as a space of reasons: Analytic,neo-Hegelian Marxism?

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 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 complete’, 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 historically 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 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 connections, 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 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 sophisticated 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 uncontaminated 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.

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, unintentionally, 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 knowledge 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 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 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

Robert Brandom’s reading of the Phenomenology also focuses on the story of freedom. 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 possibility 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 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 understandings 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-consciousness’ (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, generally 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 unintelligibility 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 alternatives 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.

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 economic 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 commodity 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 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 commodity, 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 commodity 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 beginning’ (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-M′-C-M″-C-M‴ and so on. Both money and the commodity are forms of value, so we could also rewrite the cycle as V-V-V′-V′-V″-V″-V‴ 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 differentiation 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 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] subjective 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 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 interactions 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 Althusser’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 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 difference 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 associated 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, postmodern 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, scientism, 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 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 independent 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 straightforwardly 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 knowledge 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 selfhood 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 reconciliation 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 accurately represents our ongoing alienation. His mistake is to affirm them both as necessary. Instead, he should have admitted their incoherence and argued that knowledge 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).