Hegel's Logic, Marx's Science, Rationalism's Perils

Abstract

Marx's use of Hegel's logic in the Grundrisse and Capital allows him to analyse society as objectively determined while avoiding the crudities of mechanistic explanation. However, when combined with its influence on his theory of history, the logic's influence on Marx's science precipitates a fracture between the ideas of a past governed by a hidden dynamic and a future governed by human reason; and between the methods required to make sense of a past whose participants have made the wrong sense of it and a future which perfectly mirrors its participants' intentions and beliefs. It is argued that what Marx sees as two temporally distinct forms of action are, in truth, internal moments of action: all action is, if in shifting proportions, relatively opaque and relatively transparent to its own authors.