The Hegel–Marx Connection, edited by Tony Burns and Ian Fraser, is a rigorously composed, richly argued, and conceptually expansive inquiry into one of the most enduring and difficult problems in modern social and political thought: how Hegel’s speculative system and dialectical logic were taken up, inverted, preserved, and transformed within Marxist theory. The volume rejects any reduction of this relationship to a linear story of influence or to an anecdotal footnote about “turning Hegel on his head.” Instead, it presents the Hegel–Marx relation as an ongoing, internally conflicted dialogue that has shaped debates about method and system, political economy and the critique of capitalism, the nature of history and human needs, the meaning of freedom and emancipation, the architecture of the modern state and civil society, and the analysis of international relations. Bringing together leading scholars—Terrell Carver, Christopher J. Arthur, Gary Browning, David Boucher, Andrew Chitty, Joseph McCarney, and Howard Williams—the editors curate a set of essays that collectively illuminate the connective tissue linking Hegel’s system-oriented philosophy to Marx’s revolutionary reworking of social theory and critique of political economy.
From the outset, the editors emphasize the interpretive and historical work performed by their extensive introduction. They situate the question in the aftermath of Hegel’s death in 1831, when interpretive conflicts over his legacy divided students and followers into rival camps. On one side stood the so-called Old Hegelians, inclined toward theological and political orthodoxy and disposed to regard Hegel’s philosophy as the completion of metaphysical inquiry; on the other stood the Young Hegelians, who radicalized Hegel’s critique, mobilizing dialectic as a weapon against entrenched religious authority and authoritarian politics. Figures such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, and Arnold Ruge pressed Hegel’s categories into contemporary polemics, sometimes reading him as a covert ally of revolutionary transformation. The editors analyze how, in the political and police-state environment of the 1830s and 1840s, Hegel could be invoked both by defenders of the status quo and by radical critics—an ambiguity that profoundly shaped Marx’s entry into, and departure from, Hegelianism.
Marx emerges in this milieu as at once captivated by Hegel’s dialectical power and resistant to what he regarded as philosophical mystification. In the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843), he charges Hegel with allowing abstract predicates to dominate concrete human subjects, thereby inverting the real relation between living social actors and the conceptual forms that purport to grasp them. The editors and contributors treat this early confrontation not as a personal dispute but as a formative break that prepared the ground for Marx’s distinctive project. In this sense, the roots of Marx’s materialism lie neither in an outright rejection of Hegel nor in a passive acceptance of Feuerbach; rather, they are forged in a dialectical struggle with both—retaining Hegel’s dynamic of conceptual development while relocating its motor in social labor, production, and historically determinate relations.
The mediating role of Feuerbach is carefully reconstructed. Marx initially embraced Feuerbach’s materialist critique of religion as an antidote to idealist abstraction, but he soon judged it “contemplative,” insufficiently attuned to praxis and the transformative character of human activity. The Theses on Feuerbach (1845) express this verdict programmatically: philosophy must be grounded in practice. Yet even where Marx moves beyond Feuerbach, he maintains that Hegel—despite mystifying tendencies—had registered something decisive about alienation and the laboring activity at the center of human life. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) already articulate this double movement: an appreciation of Hegel’s insight into estrangement combined with a critique of Hegel’s displacement of alienation into abstraction rather than locating it in the concrete processes of production and exploitation.
A major strength of the volume lies in its sustained analysis of Marx’s return to Hegel during the long gestation of his economic writings. While composing the Grundrisse (1857–58), Marx re-engages Hegel’s Logic, finding in it resources for clarifying how “abstractions” can be dialectically transformed into determinate concepts without collapsing into empty formalism. His procedure of ascending from abstract categories (commodity, value, money) to concrete totalities (capital, accumulation, crisis, world market) unmistakably bears the imprint of Hegel’s movement from indeterminate immediacy to structured concretion—albeit now re-grounded in material relations. In Capital, Marx famously describes his method as the direct opposite of Hegel’s mystified dialectic, yet in the 1873 Afterword he also acknowledges himself a pupil of Hegel, crediting him with first articulating the general forms of motion of the dialectic. This double claim—repudiation and acknowledgment—is the hinge upon which the volume turns: Marx’s inversion preserves; his preservation transforms; and the transformation continuously re-exposes the Hegelian core within a materialist critique.
The contributors develop this thesis across multiple axes. Christopher J. Arthur, working in the “new dialectics” tradition, reconstructs the architecture of Capital through Hegelian categories—essence and appearance, quantity and quality, finite and infinite, the logic of inversion—to show how Marx’s analysis of value, surplus value, and the circuit of capital depends upon a dialectical logic transposed into the register of political economy. On this reading, the expansionary compulsion of capital and its tendency to overcome successive quantitative limits are illuminated by a logic of internal contradiction and self-movement that is recognizably Hegelian, even as its content is now thoroughly social and material.
Joseph McCarney and Andrew Chitty likewise emphasize the systematic ambitions that Marx inherits from Hegel. Their essays argue that Marx’s critique is not merely an empirical sociology of capitalism but a systematic exposition in which categories unfold and determine one another. The commodity presupposes value; value solicits money; money gives rise to capital; capital differentiates itself into circuits of production and circulation; and the totality retroactively rearticulates its parts. The model is not an imitation of Hegel’s Encyclopedia; it is a refunctioning of systematic dialectic under the primacy of material relations. The upshot is neither a collapse into idealism nor a retreat into empiricism, but a rigorous methodological middle path owing much to Hegel’s logic of development.
At the same time, Terrell Carver provides a salutary counterweight by interrogating whether the “Hegel–Marx connection” is itself a narrativized construct, consolidated by Engels and later traditions. Carver asks whether Marx can be read productively without Hegel, or at least without the retrospective lens that exaggerates Hegel’s presence. The value of this challenge is not to sever the link but to compel greater historical and philological care: the connection cannot be assumed; it must be demonstrated textually and contextually, in the specificity of Marx’s changing engagements and the polyvalent uses of “Hegelianism” across the nineteenth century.
Gary Browning brings the early Marx into sharper focus through the dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, revealing a Hegelian style of theorizing already at work in Marx’s youthful reflections on necessity, contingency, and the historicity of philosophical problems. Ian Fraser complements this by examining Hegel’s account of civil society, the division of labor, and human needs, and by showing how Marx both inherits and transposes these themes. Where Hegel’s Sittlichkeit analyzes the institutional conditions under which freedom is actualized, Marx places stress on the material organization of production and the social mediation of needs, thereby pivoting from ethical life as institutionally realized freedom to a critical theory of how prevailing institutions produce alienation and exploitation.
David Boucher and Howard Williams explore the normative horizon that subtends both approaches to freedom. In Hegel, freedom is realized in and through institutional forms that reconcile subjectivity with ethical life; in Marx, the promise of freedom requires not merely reinterpreting such institutions but transforming the material relations of production that shape—and often thwart—human flourishing. Both perspectives retain a historical conception of freedom: it is not a static possession but an achievement of social life, embedded in practices, relations, and forms of recognition. The contrast is therefore neither a simple opposition of idealism and materialism nor a neat complementarity; it is a productive tension that keeps the theoretical project of emancipation alive.
A recurrent thread through the volume is the problem of method and the status of “science.” Hegel conceived his system as a Wissenschaft, a science of logic and of the idea’s self-development. Marx calls his project a critique of political economy, in part to distance it from dogmatic system-building. Yet much of the architecture of Capital—its categorical progression, its reflexive totality, its account of fetishism as the form in which social relations appear—discloses an aspiration to systematic intelligibility. The contributors resist the temptation to resolve this tension by declaring Marx either a crypto-Hegelian or a strict empiricist. Instead, they underscore how Marx retools Hegel’s systematicity to generate a logic of the capitalist social form: a science of historically specific relations, rather than an ontology of Spirit.
The editors’ introduction also reconstructs the long afterlife of the Hegel–Marx relation. Engels’s codification of “dialectical materialism,” Lenin’s insistence on studying Hegel’s Logic to grasp Capital, Lukács’s retrieval of totality and reification, Korsch’s call to reunify theory and practice, the Frankfurt School’s fusion of Hegelian dialectic with Marxian social critique, Kojève’s humanist reading of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, Althusser’s structuralist purge of Hegelian historicism—all of these episodes testify to the connection’s volatility and fertility. Each generation re-reads both Hegel and Marx under the pressure of its own crises: war and revolution, fascism and administered society, decolonization and structural change in global capitalism. The relation thus becomes a battlefield where the meaning of dialectic, the scope of totality, and the role of subjectivity are continually renegotiated.
Gary Browning extends this reception history into the realm of international relations and global politics. If Hegel universalizes the scope of ethical life and state rationality, and if Marx universalizes the scope of capital’s social relations, then the meeting point between them offers interpretive leverage for understanding modern state power, the internationalization of class antagonisms, and the ways global institutions can reproduce new modes of alienation. The Hegel–Marx axis is therefore not a parochial dispute confined to nineteenth-century German philosophy; it is a conceptual relay through which theories of sovereignty, global markets, imperial formations, and transnational struggles can be reframed.
Equally central is the analysis of fetishism, appearance, and essence—terms that link Hegel’s logic to Marx’s critique. The contributors show how Marx’s notion that social relations assume the “phantom objectivity” of things is inseparable from a dialectical account of how appearances are neither mere illusions nor transparent windows onto reality. As in Hegel, appearance has structure; it is a necessary mode in which essence presents itself. Marx’s originality lies in specifying the historically determinate conditions under which the commodity form and value-form generate those appearances. Consequently, the critique of fetishism is not an unveiling that dispenses with appearance; it is an immanent critique that shows how appearance can be read to reveal the contradictions of the underlying social form.
Several essays return to the tension between idealism and materialism, not to reinforce a cliché but to clarify what is at stake. Hegel conceives the rational as actual, and the actual as rational, within a development in which contradictions are neither accidental nor terminal; they are motors of transformation. Marx accepts the centrality of contradiction but relocates it: the contradiction is not in the self-movement of categories as such, but in the social relations of production, the exploitation built into wage labor, and the cyclical compulsion to accumulate. The capitalist totality is thus dialectical not because it is an expression of Spirit, but because it is constituted by antagonistic relations that develop according to their immanent logic and generate crises that disclose the limits of the form. This agreement in method, together with a decisive disagreement about subject matter and ontological ground, is the paradoxical unity at the heart of the Hegel–Marx connection.
The book’s breadth is matched by its careful attention to textual detail. The early Marx of the Doctoral Dissertation and the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State; the transitional Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts; the mature Marx of the Grundrisse and Capital—each moment is read with an eye to how Hegel is opposed, appropriated, and transformed. The result is a nuanced portrait in which neither thinker appears as static. Hegel shifts, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from conservative system-builder to unwitting revolutionary, from philosopher of the Prussian state to analyst of recognition and ethical life. Marx, for his part, appears in multiple guises as he re-encounters Hegel: as a sharp critic of political theology, as a theorist of alienation and species-being, as an architect of the value-form analysis, and as a systematic critic of capital’s global dynamics.
The Hegel–Marx Connection demonstrates that any serious engagement with Marx’s critique of political economy must pass through Hegel’s dialectic, and that any serious engagement with Hegel’s dialectic benefits from Marx’s demystifying relocation of its motor in labor, production, and material relations. The familiar slogan that Marx simply inverted Hegel gives way here to a more demanding picture of inversion as at once negation and preservation, destruction and renewal. It is precisely this unresolved tension—between system and critique, appearance and essence, freedom and its institutional realization, totality and contradiction—that endows the Hegel–Marx dialogue with its enduring power.
By uniting historical reconstruction, close textual analysis, and reflection on contemporary theoretical stakes, Burns and Fraser offer a volume that is at once a guide to a classic philosophical dispute and a resource for present inquiry. The essays show how the dialectical method, when freed from the caricatures that either deify or dismiss it, remains indispensable for analyzing modern social forms—commodity exchange, money and credit, accumulation and crisis, state power and international order—and for evaluating the prospects of human emancipation under conditions that both enable and obstruct it. In doing so, the book affirms that the Hegel–Marx relation is not a settled question but a site of ongoing theoretical labor, one that continues to generate insight into the contradictory totalities of our world and the practical horizons of their possible transformation.
Simon Gros 
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