Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic: Marxist-Humanism and Critical Theory in the United States is a closely argued reconstruction of a problem that is at once conceptual and historical: how the Hegelian dialectic of necessity and freedom is taken up, transformed, and made socially determinate within Marx’s critique of political economy—and how that determinacy, in turn, mediated the emergence of Hegelian Marxism and Marxist-Humanism in the United States through a long, demanding dialogue between Herbert Marcuse and Raya Dunayevskaya and, later, the decisive re-reading of Marx proposed by Moishe Postone.
The book’s wager is that close textual attention to Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Mind, to Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital, and to the concrete historical configurations of automation, class formation, and the postwar restructuring of industrial societies can clarify a dialectic that is frequently cited and rarely explicated: the passage from necessity to freedom—and the refusal to oppose them as if they were two sealed and incommunicable regions of life. The result is neither an antiquarian exercise in history of ideas nor a mere rehearsal of received narratives about “Western Marxism.” It is a reconstruction of a moving problem whose inner articulation—in theory and in history—matters for any contemporary attempt to grasp capitalism’s contradictions and to think the conditions of a post-capitalist association worthy of the name.
Situated within Michael J. Thompson’s series “Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,” the study is introduced against a double background that frames its task with unusual precision. On one side are the “warm” and “cold” currents that, as Ernst Bloch suggested, have long divided Marxist theory between an explanatory, law-seeking analysis of the movement of capital and a humanist critique of alienation and degradation—currents whose uneasy coexistence is precisely what the dialectic of necessity and freedom must render intelligible. On the other side is a claim, crucial for the whole book, that Hegel’s concept of reciprocity (Wechselwirkung) in the Science of Logic has been insufficiently appreciated in Marxist receptions of Hegel, including Marcuse’s, and that this conceptual omission bears directly on how labor, value, and social interdependence are subsequently theorized. Rockwell’s point is not scholastic: if reciprocity is the determinate form in which necessity becomes “seen” rather than “blind,” then any theory of the transition to freedom that leaves reciprocity aside risks misdescribing both the constraint internal to social reproduction and the way freedom incorporates necessity as its unsubstantial moment. In this sense the book aligns with a humanist insistence on ends worthy of human beings, while insisting that those ends ripen immanently within the contradictory dynamics of capitalist society rather than arriving as moral imperatives from outside.
The architecture of the argument is itself dialectical. Early chapters establish the philosophical and biographical grounds for reading Marcuse and Dunayevskaya together, and they do so not by sentimentalizing a correspondence but by extracting, with care, the conceptual stakes of their most persistent disagreements. The middle movement follows Marcuse’s Hegelian Marxism into its engagements with Grundrisse and Capital, and places alongside it Habermas’s influential readings of Marx’s value theory and “general intellect,” precisely where the question of necessity and freedom becomes entangled with science, technology, and the historical transformations of the labor process. The final movement takes up Postone’s reconstruction of value, abstract labor, and abstract time, arguing that it both addresses impasses evident in the Marcuse–Dunayevskaya exchange and enables a new formulation of Marx’s “autocritiques”—including a third one that, Rockwell claims, is visible only in retrospect and bears directly on Marx’s late formulation of the realms of necessity and freedom in Capital III. The table of contents reflects this progression while anchoring it in the U.S. trajectory of Hegelian Marxism and Marxist-Humanism and in the concrete question that repeatedly forces itself into the conversation: what does automation do to labor, and what does that do to the very sense of social necessity and the possibility of freedom?
The book’s starting point is precise: Marx’s most compressed description of a technologically advanced capitalism appears in Capital I’s analysis of relative surplus value—machinery, large-scale industry, the social implications of production’s trajectory. Postone’s later turn to this section is not anachronistic, Rockwell insists, but an index of how the dialectic of self-critique in Marx clasps together the philosophical appropriation of Hegel and the social theorization of value’s domination. The implication is double. First, the necessity–freedom dialectic is internal to capitalism itself, not a moral antithesis projected upon it. Second, any credible sketch of post-capitalist association must reckon with the fact that the historical possibility of shortened necessary labor time and of rational collective control over our interchange with nature is generated within capitalist development itself. The dialectic is not a ladder to be kicked away; it is the process that generates and limits the conditions of emancipation.
From this vantage, the book reconstructs the American origins of “Critical Theory” in Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, while refusing to read that book in isolation from the postwar shift in Marcuse’s assessments of class composition, technological development, and the status of Hegel for a contemporary critical social theory. Rockwell juxtaposes Marcuse’s long collaboration with the Institute for Social Research to Dunayevskaya’s more gradual constitution of Marxist-Humanism in the United States, showing how their divergent orientations toward Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (and toward the 1844 manuscripts) crystalized into different strategies for thinking automation, class, and post-capitalist transition. The striking claim is that their common ground—the centrality of the necessity–freedom problem—did not prevent their trajectories from parting, in part because Marcuse increasingly severed freedom from any moment in the realm of necessity, whereas Dunayevskaya kept searching in Hegel for a more immanent passage that could sustain a dialectical unity of the two without collapsing them.
In placing the correspondence at the heart of the book’s analysis, Rockwell does not treat these letters as curiosities but as the ground on which it thinks about value, labor, and freedom and tests it against historical developments that neither interlocutor could ignore. In the late 1950s and 1960, for example, as Marcuse drafted what would become One-Dimensional Man, Dunayevskaya sent him workers’ reflections on automation—materials gathered in the pamphlet Workers Battle Automation under the auspices of the News & Letters Committees. Marcuse’s reply is revealing: partial automation “saves the capitalist system,” only “consummated automation” would explode it; the “humanization of labor” properly belongs not to the realm of necessity but to the realm of freedom beyond it, so that the total “de-humanization” of necessary labor becomes, paradoxically, a prerequisite for freedom’s emergence. Rockwell reads this not as an incidental polemical flourish but as a decisive reorientation: the realm of necessity becomes a relic, emptied of any immanent freedom, and the politics of the interval—the struggle over the length and organization of necessary labor—loses its dialectical weight.
On Rockwell’s reconstruction, 1960 marks a hinge. In the preface to Soviet Marxism and in contemporaneous articles, Marcuse begins to claim that nationalized property eliminates internal resistance to full automation in the USSR, while in the United States both capitalists and workers resist complete automation—capitals due to profitability constraints, workers out of fear of technological unemployment. The implication for the correspondence is bleak: a shared “anti-automation” interest sets both classes against the critical theory’s horizon, which now wagers on a technologically induced leap to a realm where necessity withers. The rift with Dunayevskaya becomes unavoidable, less because of any one theoretical disagreement than because of the practical consequences of Marcuse’s stance for understanding class composition, socialist possibility, and the persistent actuality of the necessity–freedom dialectic.
To understand why this rift matters for value theory, Rockwell carefully reconstructs two “phases” of Marcuse’s reading of the Grundrisse. In the mid-1950s Marcuse still treats Grundrisse as the missing link that displays the inner identity of philosophical, economic, and political stages in Marx’s theory and that secures the unity of Grundrisse with Capital. In Soviet Marxism he even calls Grundrisse the most important of Marx’s manuscripts, the place where humanist philosophy is fulfilled in the economic theory of Capital. But by One-Dimensional Man and in “The Obsolescence of Socialism,” Marcuse suggests that Grundrisse contains a “revisionist” opening against the labor theory of value, one that Marx later “repressed” in Capital—a discontinuity that he aligns with automation’s growing dominance. Rockwell demonstrates how this shift not only undermines Marcuse’s earlier logic but blurs the critical distinction in Marx between value as a specifically capitalist form of wealth (whose substance is abstract labor time) and material wealth as the historically variable productivity of concrete labor under changing technical compositions. If the distinction collapses, then the dialectic of necessity and freedom appears as a technological substitution rather than as the contradictory movement of value’s social mediation.
The book’s middle chapters consider Habermas’s powerful, and controversial, formative interventions: his early 1960s essays and Knowledge and Human Interests locate in Grundrisse an “unofficial theory” of science and technology—the famous pages on machinery and general intellect—that seems to suspend the labor theory of value and hence to foreshadow a rationalization of society by communicative action rather than by the law of value. Rockwell’s treatment is precise. Habermas’s claim that Capital suppresses what Grundrisse anticipates both motivates a search for a new critical ground and depends on reading productivity’s increase as transposing the very measure of wealth. The problem, Rockwell argues, is that Marx repeatedly separates the measure of specifically capitalist wealth—socially necessary labor time—from the growth of material wealth through science and technique, and he theorizes the contradiction of a system that both depends on labor time as the measure of value and tends to reduce the same labor time as a condition of productivity. Confusing these moments risks turning the necessity–freedom dialectic into a theory of technical supersession, as if abstract domination could be undone by the predominance of machines.
Rockwell’s most consequential claim is that Postone’s re-interpretation of Marx constitutes a third, qualitatively different phase in the Critical Theory reception of Grundrisse and Capital. Against “second-phase” readings that naturalize a break in Marx, Postone argues for the inner consistency of Marx’s mature critique: abstract labor and abstract time are not metaphors but the real social forms through which capitalist modernity is constituted; value is not a normative measuring rod but a historically specific principle of social agreement that mediates social interdependence “behind the backs” of the producers. On this basis Postone can explain how the rise of science-intensive production increases material wealth while intensifying value’s abstract domination (through the compulsion to reduce necessary labor time and expand surplus time) and how the dominance of abstract time temporalizes social life under the tyranny of socially necessary labor time. The dialectic of necessity and freedom, in this frame, is not a two-realm geography but a historical movement in which concrete labor is progressively subordinated to abstract labor, and in which the “realm of necessity” can be rationalized only to the extent that social mediation ceases to take the fetishized form of value.
A virtue of Rockwell’s exposition is that it does not simply juxtapose Marcuse and Postone; it shows how Postone’s precision illuminates what Marcuse got right and where he erred. Thus Rockwell claims that Marcuse never ceased to insist on class domination and on the negativity of capitalist totality; but he also shows that Marcuse’s concept of totality remains tied to overt social relations and cannot grasp the specifically capitalist form of totality that Postone names—an abstract, homogeneous relationality that pervades every aspect of social life and that is objectively real independent of intention or consciousness. In that sense, Marcuse’s claim that the concept connecting Marx’s dialectic to the history of class society is necessity (and that freedom belongs to the post-capitalist negation) mislocates the dialectic by placing necessity and freedom in two opposed totalities, rather than seeing how freedom can be won within the rationalization of necessity and on its basis, once the social mediation that renders necessity “blind” is overcome.
The stakes come into focus when Rockwell returns to Hegel. The passages on causality and reciprocity at the end of the Objective Logic, and the transition to the Notion, are not simple detours: they teach how necessity becomes “seeing” in and through reciprocal determination, how freedom does not float above necessity but sublates it as an unsubstantial moment within itself. When Hegel names the “realm of freedom” in the Logic, he does not oppose it to necessity; he shows freedom as the immanent form in which necessity is grasped and governed. Rockwell’s point is not to collapse Marx into Hegel but to show that Marx’s late formulation of the realms of necessity and freedom in Capital III—associated producers rationally regulating their metabolic interchange with nature; shortening of the working day as the fundamental premise—is best read as a social appropriation of Hegel’s dialectic, mediated by Marx’s analysis of value and labor’s twofold character. Freedom is not the absence of necessity; it is the historically determinate form in which necessity is collectively organized in a way “most adequate to human nature,” and upon which the “true realm of freedom” can flourish.
This Hegelian inflection matters for how Rockwell situates Marx’s own self-revisions. Two early autocritiques—concerning objectification and alienation, and concerning substance and the historical subject—structure the passage from the humanism of the 1844 manuscripts to the mature critique of Capital. Rockwell then proposes a third autocritique, which emerges only when one reads Marx’s late account of necessity and freedom alongside the philosophical itinerary that begins in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Marx implicitly corrects his own youthful critique of Hegel by recoding the necessity–freedom dialectic in social-historical terms, thereby clarifying both the extent and the limits of freedom within the realm of necessity and approaching a concept of freedom that presupposes, rather than negates, the rational mastery of necessary labor. It is precisely Postone’s reconstruction of abstract labor and abstract time, Rockwell argues, that makes this autocritique legible.
Against this background, the book’s readings of Grundrisse’s “machines” fragment, Capital’s Part IV on relative surplus value, and the late passage in Capital III on the two realms are not merely exegetical. They measure competing accounts of how technology figures in the contradiction. If one treats the growth of science-based productivity as directly undermining the labor theory of value, the dialectic risks flattening into a narrative of technical liberation, with “full automation” imagined as a threshold where necessity vanishes. But if one keeps distinct the specifically capitalist form of wealth (value) and the material wealth generated by science and technique, then automation appears not as emancipation in embryo but as the intensification of a contradiction in which capital both depends on and undermines its own measure—socially necessary labor time—producing a compulsion to shrink the working day while expanding the social domination of abstract time. That is why the rationalization of necessity—collective control over metabolism with nature coupled with the reduction of necessary labor time—is the condition of freedom’s unfolding, not its technocratic substitute.
Returning to the correspondence, Rockwell isolates the conceptual hinge on which Marcuse and Dunayevskaya repeatedly turned: is there any freedom in the realm of necessity? Marcuse’s later position, already implicit in his 1960 letters, is unambiguous: no; freedom lies beyond necessity, which must be “de-humanized” to be transcended. Dunayevskaya, by contrast, insists that the struggle within necessary labor—its organization, duration, and relation to associated producers’ rational control—is not merely preparatory but constitutive of freedom’s basis. The disagreement is sharpened by their divergent assessments of the working class in “advanced industrial society” and by the political meaning they assign to “integration”: for Marcuse, both capital and labor converge to slow automation; for Dunayevskaya, new movements and new kinds of subjectivity unsettle any simple story of integration and preserve the dialectic of practice and concept. Rockwell does not adjudicate this by fiat; he shows how the dispute anticipates the analytic precision that Postone later supplies.
The same dialectical sobriety characterizes Rockwell’s treatment of Habermas. Rather than rehearsing easy oppositions between “philosophy” and “science,” he shows how Habermas’s insistence on an “unofficial” theory of technology in Grundrisse converges with Marcuse’s second-phase reading to suggest that value’s measure is contingent on technical development, thereby obscuring the specificity of abstract labor as social mediation. Rockwell’s response is textual and systematic: by returning to Marx’s own separation of value and material wealth, he resists a narrative in which the historical preponderance of science in production could, by itself, dissolve value’s domination. The more science there is in production, the more acute becomes the contradiction between the measure of value and the drive to reduce necessary labor time; to treat that contradiction as if it were a moral incoherence or a mere technical stage is to miss what makes the dialectic “the hardest of all transitions.”
The concluding chapters turn to the problems most readers seek and few books address without platitude: what, in this frame, can be said about post-capitalist society; what becomes of subjectivity; how are Marx’s letters to Zasulich and the Russian Manifesto preface to be understood without importing fatalism? Rockwell’s answer remains formally Hegelian and substantively Marxian. First, the dialectic of necessity and freedom is historical, not metaphysical. Second, subjectivity has standing only as it is situated in a form of social mediation—value—that renders the social whole abstract and homogeneous; forms of subjectivity that imagine themselves sovereign while remaining bound to that mediation are illusions of freedom. Third, a post-capitalist society is not a moral antonym of capitalism; it is the immanent reorganization whereby the associated producers shorten necessary labor time, rationalize their interchange with nature, and thereby expand the sphere in which “the development of human powers is an end in itself.” The precondition is not the extinction of necessity but its social mastery; the measure is the shortening of the working day. This is not a slogan: it is the concretely universal index of freedom’s growth.
What distinguishes the book is its refusal to relax the tension between conceptual rigor and historical specificity. It is attentive to the New York scene of the early Frankfurt School diaspora, to Marcuse’s institutional itinerary, to the political context of de-Stalinization and “peaceful coexistence,” and to the U.S. proliferation of automation debates in shops and unions; but it never treats these as mere “contexts” that excuse conceptual laxity. Instead, the historical scene is itself what the categories must grasp, and the categories are themselves historical. Thus the study’s persistent return to the twofold character of labor in the opening of Capital I, to the theory of socially necessary labor time developed in Part IV, and to the late formulation of the two realms in Capital III: these are not slogans or talismans but the conceptual scaffolding required to think the movement whereby necessity is both reproduced and transformed.
The book is therefore an intervention in three debates at once. It is a contribution to Hegel scholarship, inasmuch as it restores reciprocity and the transition to the Notion as the proper setting for thinking necessity’s visibility and freedom’s incorporation of necessity. It is a contribution to Marxology, inasmuch as it insists on the consistency of the mature critique and distances itself from narratives of break or repression that conflate value with material wealth. And it is a contribution to the intellectual history of U.S. Marxist-Humanism and Critical Theory, inasmuch as it shows how the Marcuse–Dunayevskaya dialogue crystallized theoretical alternatives whose consequences reach beyond their immediate polemical targets into our own debates about technology, work, and emancipation. The emphasis on Postone’s “third phase” is not a canonization but a recognition that his reconstruction offers a vantage point from which to re-read both Marcuse and Dunayevskaya without caricature, and from which to grasp anew why Marx’s late pages on the two realms remain an indispensable index of conceptual clarity.
It follows that the question “Is there freedom in the realm of necessity?” cannot be answered abstractly. Freedom appears, here, neither as a political voluntarism that imagines planning can annul value’s logic, nor as a technological utopianism that imagines machines can abolish mediation. It appears as the historical possibility that arises when the specifically capitalist form of social interdependence—the mediation by abstract labor and abstract time—is superseded by conscious association; when the measure of wealth is no longer socially necessary labor time; and when the indispensable, ongoing labor of maintaining the conditions of life is organized under collective control, with the least expenditure of energy and in forms most adequate to human dignity. That is why the shortening of the working day is not a detail but a fundamental premise; why automation is not an end but a means whose social form determines its meaning; and why the dialectic that carries us from necessity to freedom must be learned in the movement of necessity itself.
To readers who approach this book looking for a final pronouncement, the method may feel demanding. Rockwell does not simplify the archive, and he credits the complexity of his interlocutors. Yet the argumentative line is clear: if we want the concept of freedom to be true, we must think it in and through the determinate forms that presently bind us. Hegel teaches how necessity becomes visible; Marx teaches how that visibility becomes social, how value mediates and dominates, and how the very development of productive forces that capitalism compels can become the material basis for a different association. Marcuse and Dunayevskaya teach the difficulty of holding together the “warm” and “cold” currents without dissolving either; Postone teaches the precision required to comprehend a totality whose abstraction is real. Rockwell’s contribution is to hold these threads long enough—and with enough conceptual patience—that the pattern shows through. It is a pattern in which neither fatalism nor moral voluntarism has the last word, because the dialectic has no outside: it is the form of our history, and the form in which that history may yet become free.
In this sense, Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic is not only a map of debates across seven decades but a model of how to treat philosophical categories as instruments for discerning the shape of a social world and its possible transformations. It restores the rigor of concepts too often invoked as slogans; it refuses to relinquish the demand that freedom be both thinkable and practicable; and it shows how the most apparently “abstract” disputes—over reciprocity in Hegel, over the status of abstract labor in Marx—touch the most concrete questions we face: time, work, technology, and the organization of life. The book’s claim is exacting and hopeful at once: the “realm of freedom” is not a sanctuary beyond our world but the form of life that becomes possible when necessity is seen, mastered, and reorganized as its unsubstantial moment—when the associated producers govern their common life in common, and when the measure of wealth is no longer time stolen from living.
If this reconstruction has a single imperative, it is this: think freedom not as exemption from necessity but as the social form in which necessity is rationally ordered by and for free people. To reach that point is to accept that the dialectic remains “the hardest transition,” and that the work of thinking it is inseparable from the work of making it real. Rockwell’s book does not pretend otherwise; it clarifies why the difficulty is irreducible and why, precisely for that reason, the concept must be kept sharp. That is a philosophical achievement and, in the sense demanded by the series in which the book appears, a public purpose.
Simon Gros 
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