Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770–1831 · Karl Marx 1818–1883
Where the lectures set Hegel and Marx side by side, as Marci Shore presents them: 10 links between their claims. Of these, 6 carry an idea forward, 3 break with it, 1 is Shore's own comparison. In every case Marx is the later thinker, answering Hegel.
Each entry shows the earlier claim and the later one that answers it. The handwriting names the link. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
Read down. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
HegelHistory's telos is a reconciliation in which the great oppositions, being and thought, freedom and necessity, fact and value, subject and object, dissolve into a single whole. L5 · 10:02
MarxMarx inverts Hegel, turning dialectics into dialectical materialism: history's driver is not Geist but socioeconomic forces, so philosophy must leave the metaphysical and ideal for the material and concrete. L5 · 33:55
Keeps Hegel's drive toward reconciling all dualisms but replaces Geist's spiritual resolution with a material, socioeconomic one.
HegelGeist is "the I that is a We": for Hegel meaning is relational, so a single act, like hitting a ball, counts for something only within the whole. L4 · 26:43
MarxMarx inverts Hegel, turning dialectics into dialectical materialism: history's driver is not Geist but socioeconomic forces, so philosophy must leave the metaphysical and ideal for the material and concrete. L5 · 33:55
Keeps the dialectic but puts material forces where Geist stood
HegelDialectics is Hegel's name for what contradictions do when they meet: a position turns out unstable, its negation displaces it, and such clashes drive history forward in jolts. L4 · 32:56
MarxMarx inverts Hegel, turning dialectics into dialectical materialism: history's driver is not Geist but socioeconomic forces, so philosophy must leave the metaphysical and ideal for the material and concrete. L5 · 33:55
Retains dialectical motion through antagonism as the engine of history
HegelHegel makes history part of philosophy's own substance, reversing a tradition since the Greeks that sought timeless, universal truth and treated the changing and contingent as noise to purge. L4 · 12:04
MarxWhat decisively shapes modern social behavior, for Marx, is industrialization: modernization in a technical and empirical sense rather than modernity as a broad condition. L5 · 24:37
Marx's historicism makes a concrete, contingent process, industrialization, decisive for thoughtOur inference
HegelAlienation, in Hegel, is failing to see your own particular life as part of Geist, of the whole; its cure is coming to feel at one with the universe's telos. L4 · 40:49
MarxFactory work estranges workers from labor itself: hired by the hour, tending machines, performing one fragment of a process whose finished product is never theirs. L5 · 29:36
Shore presents alienation as a shared preoccupation: failure to see oneself within Geist for Hegel, concrete estrangement from one's labor for Marx.
HegelShore's preferred way into the Phenomenology: a Bildungsroman of consciousness as such, maturing through stages until, midway, it merges with Geist. L4 · 21:10
MarxFor Marx, your place in the socioeconomic structure, the base, determines your thinking; consciousness, culture and art, the superstructure, derive from it. L5 · 46:02
Consciousness is no longer the protagonist of history but derivative of social being
HegelHegel's image for history is a "slaughter bench": the suffering piled up along the way is the price paid for progress toward a somewhat mystical end-point. L5 · 9:02
MarxAll history so far is class struggle, and each order carries the seeds of its own destruction: feudalism yielded to capitalism, whose bourgeoisie produces "its own grave diggers." L5 · 38:25
Class struggle concretizes Hegel's violent, sacrificial dialectic: capitalism, like feudalism, breeds its own gravediggers.Our inference
HegelAufheben, Hegel's untranslatable verb for how one stage gives way to the next, means canceling something while also keeping it and raising it onto a higher plane. L4 · 35:40
MarxAll history so far is class struggle, and each order carries the seeds of its own destruction: feudalism yielded to capitalism, whose bourgeoisie produces "its own grave diggers." L5 · 38:25
Every order carries the seeds of its own supersession, now as class antagonism
HegelFor Hegel the subjective is nearly a term of abuse: freedom means recognizing necessity, identifying with history's objective movement until you stop wanting it otherwise. L5 · 12:06
MarxIn Hegelian fashion, the Manifesto makes no distinction between forecast and prescription: the proletariat's triumph is predicted, predestined, and right, all at once. L5 · 36:39
Inherits Hegel's collapse of subjective/objective into a philosophy of history where prediction and prescription coincide, now centered on the proletariat.
HegelIn Hegel, calling something necessary and calling it good amount to the same judgment. The French Revolution was both: it had to come, so it was right. L4 · 3:13
MarxIn Hegelian fashion, the Manifesto makes no distinction between forecast and prescription: the proletariat's triumph is predicted, predestined, and right, all at once. L5 · 36:39
Inherits the collapse of what will happen into what should happen