Alienation from Hegel to Marx

Abstract

One of the pivotal issues between Critical and Scientific Marxists is the importance of “alienation” in the work of the mature Marx, and whether or not, as Scientific Marxists often believe, it was an Hegelian vestige that lost significance in his later work. Within Marx’s own tradition, the notion of alienation derives most immediately from Feuerbach and Hegel. The roots of Marx’s critique of alienation may be found, as Georg Lukàcs found them, in Hegel’s Protestantizing critique of “positivity.”¹ In this critique, Hegel rejects as “dead” those human relationships or institutions in which persons give only an outward and constrained conformity, but concerning which they lack a freely given inward conviction. The roots of the theory of alienation, then, reach down into the rejection of “constraint,” into the disjunction in which constraint is experienced as powerful-but-wrong; it is a response to the perception of this violation of the grammar of societal rationality and an effort to overcome such an “unpermitted social world.”