Bloomsbury From Marx to Hegel and Back: Capitalism, Critique, and Utopia

Given the contemporary renaissance of Marx and Marxist theories, how should we re-read the Hegel-Marx connection today? What place does Hegel have in contemporary critical thinking? Most schools of Marxism regard Marxs inversion of Hegels dialectics as a progressive development, leaving behind Hegels idealism by transforming it into a materialist critique of political economy. Other Marxist approaches argue that the mature Marx completely broke with Hegel, and so should Marxian scholarship. This volume understands Hegel as an empirically informed theorist of the social, political, and economical world. Approaching his philosophy in this materialist sense allows for discovering, despite the numerous differences, the affinities between Hegel and Marxs thought anew. It proposes a movement from Marx to Hegel and back, by exploring the intersections where the two thinkers can be read as mutually complementing or even reinforcing one another. With a particular focus on essential concepts like recognition and love, revolution, alienation, freedom, and the idea of critique, this fresh intervention into Hegelian and Marxian philosophy combines the unifying the ethical content of Hegels philosophy with the power of Marxs social and economic critique of the contemporary world.