Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social by Sevgi Doğan is a philosophically rigorous, politically charged, and historically grounded study that embarks on a systematic reconstruction of one of modernity’s most vexing and fundamental questions: the nature and role of the individual within the social totality. Rooted in the dialectical humanist tradition and shaped by the emancipatory spirit of Marxist critique, the work does not merely offer a comparative exposition of Hegel and Marx, but instead situates the concept of the individual as the central philosophical, ontological, and political problem that animates both thinkers’ engagements with modern society, the state, and human agency. Refusing simplistic oppositions between individual and collective, liberalism and communism, or idealism and materialism, Doğan proposes a refined dialectical rethinking of individuality that transcends dominant ideological frameworks, reclaiming the emancipatory potential of both Marx and Hegel.
Doğan’s methodological decision to examine Marx’s early writings—especially the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, On the Jewish Question, and the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right—in conjunction with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of Right, and Encyclopedia is not merely a textual strategy. It is an ontological and political intervention, grounded in the recognition that Marx’s thought, especially in its formative stages, arises out of a profound confrontation with Hegel’s speculative system. Rather than engaging in a sterile juxtaposition of isolated doctrines, the book presents the dialectic itself as the medium through which both thinkers grapple with the fundamental tension between universality and particularity, between the abstract individual of liberal ideology and the concrete, social individual who realizes herself through praxis, labor, and political engagement.
The originality of the work lies in its systematic reconstruction of how both Hegel and Marx understand the individual not as a fixed metaphysical essence but as a relational, developing being—one whose ontological structure is inseparable from its embedding in a network of social, political, and historical relations. Drawing from Hegel’s dialectical logic, Doğan elucidates how Hegel posits the individual as the instantiation of universality, realizing freedom not in isolation but through the institutions of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), particularly the state. Yet she simultaneously argues that Hegel’s system, for all its emphasis on mediation and reconciliation, ultimately sublates the individual into the Idea, thereby depriving the subject of its concrete singularity and its capacity for self-actualization as a political agent. This, for Doğan, constitutes a “loss of relationships”—a poignant phrase capturing how the reduction of the individual to self-consciousness, and ultimately to a moment within the unfolding of absolute spirit, effaces the very social, sensuous, and material conditions that make individuality possible.
It is precisely at this juncture that Marx’s critique intervenes. For Marx, the individual is not a mere bearer of universality but a historically situated agent, alienated by the economic and political structures of capitalism yet capable of reclaiming her agency through collective praxis. Doğan shows in detail how Marx’s critique of Hegel’s abstraction is not a repudiation of dialectic per se but a materialist transformation of its content. Where Hegel begins from thought and proceeds to being, Marx insists on beginning with the real, sensuous human being, embedded in a concrete socio-economic context. Alienation, in this reading, is not merely epistemological but ontological and practical: the individual is estranged from her product, from her species-being, from other human beings, and most fundamentally, from her own capacity for self-determination.
In tracing the genealogy of the individual from ancient Greek philosophy—especially through Aristotle’s conception of the individual substance and political animal—through medieval and Enlightenment conceptions of the self, Doğan establishes that the liberal notion of the individual as an isolated, autonomous ego is not a transhistorical constant but a historically contingent product of bourgeois modernity. Against this abstraction, she proposes an alternative conception rooted in the dialectical interrelation between individual and society, in which the subject emerges not in spite of social relations but through them. Importantly, she highlights how Marx, in texts such as On the Jewish Question, exposes the duplicity of bourgeois rights, which grant formal political equality while masking real material inequality and social fragmentation. The liberal state, far from empowering the individual, mystifies their subordination by separating political and economic spheres and reducing individuals to atomized consumers and producers.
A particularly valuable contribution of Doğan’s study is her insistence that Marx, contrary to widespread assumptions, does not neglect the concept of the individual. Rather, Marx redefines it in revolutionary terms—as a being whose freedom is not the abstract liberty to choose within existing structures, but the concrete power to transform those structures through collective political action. For Marx, the true realization of individuality requires the abolition of alienation, the overcoming of private property, and the reintegration of the political and economic realms. In this sense, Marx’s thought represents not a negation of the individual but its radical affirmation—an affirmation grounded in material relations and actual human capacities, rather than in metaphysical abstraction.
In reconstituting the individual as a “human agent,” Doğan not only retrieves a neglected dimension of Marxist thought but also challenges contemporary theories of identity and subjectivity—particularly those informed by post-structuralism and post-Marxism. She critiques thinkers such as Mouffe and Laclau for fragmenting the subject into multiple, contingent identities, thereby undermining the possibility of collective political agency. While acknowledging the plurality of subject positions, Doğan warns that such fragmentation can inadvertently serve capitalist interests by dispersing opposition and weakening solidarity. The truly political individual, she contends, is not a passive bearer of discourses but an active agent capable of praxis, resistance, and transformation.
At its core, Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social is a philosophical meditation on the conditions of human agency under late capitalism. It asks whether it is still possible to speak of the individual in an era in which social and political structures systematically deny individuals the capacity for meaningful self-determination. The answer, for Doğan, lies in reclaiming the dialectical method—not as a mere logical schema but as a philosophical praxis aimed at the unification of theory and action, thought and life. In this sense, the work is not only a study of past thinkers but a call to contemporary readers to engage in a radical interrogation of their own conditions of existence and to recover the lost dialectic between the individual and the social as the basis for a truly emancipatory politics.
Doğan’s work is distinguished by its philosophical depth, textual precision, and political urgency. It is a model of dialectical scholarship—one that not only interprets the world but seeks to change it. In its pages, the reader encounters a reimagined individual: no longer the isolated monad of liberalism, nor the dissolved multiplicity of postmodernism, but a relational, creative, political being capable of constituting new forms of life. This is the individual as Marx envisioned her: not an abstract essence but a concrete agent of history. And this is the social as Hegel glimpsed it: not a mechanical aggregate but an ethical totality. Between these two poles, Sevgi Doğan constructs a philosophy of liberation.
Simon Gros 
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