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I’m working out a thread (part 1, part 2) suggesting that that Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence (1953), which reads Hegel through the Logic and not the Phenomenology, and thereby pushes a non-humanist reading of Hegel, mattered for the French reading of Marx, which hinged on whether Marx inherited humanism or anthropology from Hegel.  I then looked at the Soviet part of that equation, and how Stalinism required the rejection of Hegel, even as Stalin himself repressed (missed entirely?) the importance of Hegel to his own understanding of dialectics.  Here I want to continue this rather elaborate project of context-setting and say something about how this plays out in France in the person of Althusser.

Althusser’s anti-Hegelianism in the 1960s is well known and represents the gymnastics necessary to retain an anti-Hegelian view while also discrediting Stalinism, which became important after Krushchev’s destalinization program, which began with a speech in 1956.  In “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962) Althusser refers to Hegel’s understanding of supersession [= Aufhebung].  For Hegel, Althusser complains, “the survival of the past as the ‘superseded’ (aufgehoen) is simply reduced to the modality of a memory, which, furthermore, is merely the inverse of (that is, the same thing as) an anticipation” (For Marx, 115; I’m removing his constant italicization). 

Althusser wants to substitute the concept of “overdetermination,” which means (among other things) that “a revolution in the structure does not ipso facto modify the existing superstructures and particularly the ideologies at one blow (as it would if the economic was the sole determinant factor)” (115-16).  This means that “the new society produced by the revolution may itself ensure the survival, that is, the reactivation, of older elements … Such a reactivation would be totally inconceivable for a dialectic deprived of overdetermination.” (116).  In other words, you might retain a badly functioning state or legal system, and maybe even make them more powerful, despite a revolution in the underlying economic superstructure.  The workers can take over, and the state form doesn’t wither away – it gets worse. This concept matters because:

“It seems to me that either the whole logic of ‘supersession’ must be rejected, or we must give up any attempt to explain how the proud and generous Russian people bore Stalin’s crimes and repression with such resignation; how the Bolshevik Party could tolerate them; not to speak of the final question – how a Communist leader could have ordered them” (116).

Either drop Hegel, or you can’t explain Stalin!  That is:

“One phantom is more especially crucial than any other today: the shade of Hegel. To drive this phantom back into the night we need a little more light on Marx, or what is the same thing, a little more Marxist light on Hegel himself. We can then escape from the ambiguities and confusions of the ‘inversion’” (116; he is referring to the line in Capital where Marx says the dialectic was standing on its head in Hegel).

As Kevin Anderson shows, Althusser’s rejection of Hegel causes him to mischaracterize Lenin’s Hegel notebooks, despite his continuing enthusiasm for Lenin (Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism, 321-5).  It is Hyppolite, of all people, who calls him out on this.  In 1968, Althusser delivered “Lenin and Philosophy” to the Société Française de Philosophie.  The speech made frequent references Lenin’s early Philosophy and Empirio-Criticism, which was written well before the Hegel notebooks.  Althusser wants to credit Lenin with “a radical break with the very concept of philosophy” (Anderson, 327) and even emphasizes that Lenin’s understanding of philosophy as an ideological practice provided necessary material that was missing in Engels.  That is, “philosophy has to recognise that it is not more than a certain investment of politics,” and “Lenin happens to have been the first to say so’” (qt. 327; original Lenin and Philosophy, 33).  To translate roughly into today’s idiom, Althusser is crediting Lenin with being the first to argue that philosophy itself is written from a specific subject position and viewpoint, and that there is therefore no view from nowhere from which philosophy could speak abstract/universal truths. What follows includes the recitation of Althusser’s thesis about the rupture in Marx’s thought with the “Theses on Feuerbach” and German Ideology.  As Anderson notes, “The glaring gap in this lengthy paper on Lenin and philosophy is that Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks are barely mentioned and never seriously discussed” (329).

This prompted Hyppolite, in one of his last public appearances, to say:

“As to Lenin, I think that the Philosophical Notebooks are subsequent to the book against empirio-criticism; I am familiar above all with the Philosophical Notebooks, and it seems to me that the great admiration that Lenin shows for Hegel, the surprising manner in which he copies Hegel, is as surprising as the manner in which he copies Abel Rey with [writing] in the margin, ‘shamefaced materialist, go away’. As for Hegel, he says things in the margins which are very profound: he remarks, with respect to the theory of essence, that he moves well [va bien] between the accidental and the essential, because between the deeper currents and the surface, the surface is very important for explaining things.” (qt. Anderson, 329).

Althusser doesn’t directly answer Hyppolite here, though as Anderson notes, the next year’s “Lenin before Hegel” appears to be an attempt to do so.  In that essay, Althusser responds directly to the notebooks, insists that Lenin did not change his mind about anything in Philosophy and empirio-criticism on their account, and this because “basically, Lenin did not need to read Hegel in order to understand him, because he had already understood Hegel, having closely read and understood Marx” (Lenin and Philosophy, 112).

All of that is the 1960s, and Althusser’s work shows the long shadow that the Hegel question has; I think it also suggests that its historical presentation through the Soviets matters, as someone like Althusser is clearly inheriting the terms of a debate within which he has to work.

By the early 1950s, the reigning Stalinist reading of Marx was being challenged by the appearance of Marx’s early work, in particular the 1844 Manuscripts. In a 1953 essay, Althusser notes of these “’philosophical’ works, marked by the pervasive influence of Hegel and Feuerbach” (Spectre of Hegel,260) that the “importance we assign these early texts … will command our general interpretation of Marxism” (261).  Option 1, which Althusser says is followed by Hyppolite and Gurvitch “hold that they contain Marx’s basic inspiration” such that “they become Marxism’s criterion of validity and the principle that will inform our interpretation of Marxism” (ibid).   Option 2, Althusser’s preferred (even then; recall that this is what the Soviets were saying, even before the formalization of the argument into the “epistemological rupture” of the 1960s) says that “these early works reflect the interests of the young Marx [who] … put this point of departure behind him in order to work out an original theory.” Doing so will allow us to “regard these early works as transitional, and seek in them less the truth of Marxism than the intellectual trajectory of the young Marx” (261).  This option of course had the additional advantage of lining up with the Stalinist views of the PCF.

Hyppolite’s Marx had been the object of Althusser’s sustained (though anonymous) critique in his 1950 “Return to Hegel,” which shows every sign of being occasioned by Hyppolite’s developing interest in Marx.  Hyppolite started publishing on Marx shortly after the war, with “Marxisme et philosophie” (1946), “La conception hégélienne de l’État et sa critique par Karl Marx” (1947), and “De la structure du Capital et de quelques presuppositions philosophiques de l’œuvre de Marx” (1948) appearing in quick succession (for a bibliography of Hyppolite’s work, see the final section of Giuseppi Bianco, ed., Jean Hyppolite: entre structure et existence).  The third of these seemed to have specifically struck an Althusserian nerve, and so in 1950 Althusser published an unsigned response in the PCF’s La nouvelle critique.  Althusser begins his essay with two epigraphs.  One amalgamates several lines from Hyppolite’s “Structure of Capital,” including the line that “today it may be necessary to make revisions Marx never dreamt of.”  The other is from Zhdanov: “the Hegel question has long been resolved” (qt. Spectre of Hegel, 177).

Althusser’s essay sets out to understand why the “dead god” of Hegel, “covered with insults and buried a hundred times over, is rising from the grave” and in particular why there is such a “to-do connected with the academic and religious jubilation over a reviving corpse” (178).  Hegel, on Althusser’s account, had originally been without interest to bourgeois philosophy.  Hegel in the mid 1800s had two meanings.  One reading “served as a warrant for the most reactionary elements in the Prussian monarchy” (179).  The other, Marx’s of course, “thanks to the rigour of its rational method, its conception of history as process, and its reflections on labour and the dialectic … could also foster a ‘critical and revolutionary philosophy’ capable of calling into question, not only feudalism, but even the bourgeois order” (179).  In short:

“The content of the system and the ‘dialectical benediction’ could be pressed into the service of the reactionary feudal state. The critical, revolutionary method could help spawn a scientific theory of history. But the bourgeoisie, for its part, had nothing to gain from Hegel” (180).

Althusser then recounts a story of the retreat of the bourgeoisie into ideology as its class position goes from ascendant (when economists like Adam Smith were its philosophers) to the shocks of the 1848 revolutions, when liberalism was forced to “entrust[] its fortunes to ‘strongmen’” like Napoleon III and Bismarck, dedicate itself narrowly to business, and then take “refuge in philosophy” in the form of neo-Kantianism (181).  The 20c then saw a series of escalating crises for the capitalist order: imperialism, the rise of the USSR, the rise of fascism.  This led to a retreat from Kant to Hegel:

“Grosso modo, it can be said that the bourgeois philosophers changed masters when their world changed form, and that they made their transition from Kant to Hegel when capitalism made its from liberalism to imperialism” (183).

What they sought was the ability to forge “myths equal to the crisis, for consumption by the bourgeoisie’s victims – capable of fashioning an ideology of servitude to bamboozle its victims and mobilize them in the defence of its most recent positions” (183).

The result was a return to Hegel in order to discredit communism and portray the social problems caused by capitalism as inevitable features of the human condition.  This operation had two basic parts.  The first was to argue that Hegel was irrational; “unlike the theoreticians of scientific socialism, [the bourgeoisie] did not undertake a critique of the system with a view to extracting its rational, revolutionary kernel. It zeroed in on the reactionary elements in Hegel’s philosophy … and it set out to show that the revolutionary in Hegel was simply the reactionary in disguise” (184).  The resulting exegesis involved Dilthey, Haering, Kroner and Glockner in Germany, and “Jean Wahl and Hyppolite served as their teaching assistants [répétiteurs] in France” (185).  In particular, Hegel’s youthful work was interpreted with as irrationalist, and then Hegel’s mature work interpreted as in light of that.

This part of the return to Hegel aligns with a focus on the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology (“Fessard, Rqquet, Hyppolite, Kojève & co. delight in this myth,” 187) and “they find in it the idea that the basis of the ‘human condition’ is anguish and violence, the ‘struggle for prestige,’ the ‘struggle unto death’ … they thus project onto the Hegelian myth the major themes of contemporary fascism.”  Why would the bourgeoisie do this?  These are “the sole concepts that can justify the extreme forms of its dictatorship – violence and war” (187).

It also leads to the “revision” of Marx, as Althusser returns to the quote from Hyppolite with which he began the entire exercise.  Faced with millions of communist Marxists, the bourgeois philosopher urgently seeks to find out “what does the truth have to be for the Communists to be wrong” and “What does Marx have to be for the Communists to be wrong?” (188). That is:

“Our bourgeois philosophers’ Hegel is currently playing an important part in this operation, which has to show very plainly what the real Marx must be for (1) the Communists to be wrong, and for (2) the imperialist bourgeoisie to be right to treat them as it does, and to continue to pursue its violent policies” (188).

At the end of this process, Marx is a Hegelian who “simply integrated into the movement of the Idea an economic content” but who as “a utopian who wanted to realize the impossible Idea of communism” and who thereby instrumentalized the proletariat (“instrument” is in quotes, and the reference is to Hyppolite’s “Hegelian Concept of the State” and its statement that the proletariat is the “instrument of the realization of … social man”).  The proletariat “has only discovered the truth of the universal human condition: the tragic nature of violence and the struggle unto death, which one can already read about in Hegel” (189).

Next time I’ll look at Hyppolite’s 1940s work on Marx.