Kmflett's Blog

Hegel b 27th August 1770. Marx’s critique of Hegel’s view of beards

In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) Marx made a specific reference to Hegel’s error of understanding about the role beards played in society.

For Hegel a beard was something abstract, something worn by a beard wearer. For Marx the key thing was the social interaction that the beard and beard wearer had. Hence the focus was on human relationships rather than abstract principles. The key passage is here:

The activities and agencies of the state are attached to individuals (the state is only active through individuals), but not to the individual as physical but political; they are attached to the political quality of the individual. Hence it is ridiculous to say, as Hegel does, that ‘it is in an external and contingent way that these offices are linked with particular persons’. On the contrary, they are linked with them by a vinculum substantiale, by reason of an essential quality of particular persons. These offices are the natural action of this essential quality. Hence the absurdity of Hegel’s conceiving the activities and agencies of the state in the abstract, and particular individuality in opposition to it. He forgets that particular individuality is a human individual, and that the activities and agencies of the state are human activities. He forgets that the nature of the particular person is not his beard, his blood, his abstract Physis, but rather his social quality, and that the activities of the state, etc., are nothing but the modes of existence and operation of the social qualities of men. Thus it is evident that individuals, in so far as they are the bearers of the state’s activities and powers, are to be considered according to their social and not their private quality.