The Hegelian Element in Western Marxism

The body of scholarship in both Chinese and international academia on the relationship between Western Marxism and Hegel is, if not overwhelming or vast, at least considerable. One important dimension involves analyzing, from the perspective of the state and national spirit, the disjuncture within Western Marxism between adopting a “pro-Hegel” approach that fully absorbs Hegel’s research findings when conducting social critique, and adopting a “pro-Kant” approach that returns to pre-Hegelian thought when it comes to practice and construction. This disjuncture merits study and reflection. It can be said that, by drawing on Marx, exploring a new Marxist program that is pro-Hegelian in both critique and practical method but replaces ontology with “the positive existence of the human” and “the positive essence of the human” is well worth in-depth consideration and research.

国内外学界对国外马克思主义与黑格尔关系展开研究的论著，不说是汗牛充栋或浩如烟海，至少也是蔚为壮观的。其中一个重要的维度是试图从国家与民族精神的视角，分析国外马克思主义在展开社会批判时采取充分吸收黑格尔研究成果的“近黑格尔”方案，而在实践和建构方面却采取回到黑格尔之前的“近康德”方案，这二者之间的错位值得研究与反思。可以说，借助马克思，探索一条在批判和实践方法上都是近黑格尔的但在本体论上替换为“人的积极存在”和“人的积极本质”的马克思主义新方案，则是很值得深入思考和研究的。

The Inheritance of the Method of Totality

总体性方法的继承

Apart from a series of works that directly take Hegel as their main object of study—such as Lukács’s *The Young Hegel*, Marcuse’s *Reason and Revolution*, and Adorno’s *Negative Dialectics*—other works of Western Marxism also cannot bypass Hegel. However, the ways in which they engage and wrestle with Hegel vary according to their respective theoretical interests. The success or failure of their theories and their contemporary significance depend on their exploration of critical and practical philosophy concerning modern society within the coordinate system of the state and national spirit. The main reason is that, unlike general liberalism and contractualism, Hegel’s fundamental achievement lies in comprehensively elucidating, from the perspective of the state and national spirit, the substantive spirit of Western modern society and its forms of expression. He is the true completer of Western modern society’s self-understanding. Therefore, any philosopher who wishes to critique Western modern society must address this fundamental issue.

国外马克思主义除了一系列直接以黑格尔为主要研究对象的论著，比如卢卡奇的《青年黑格尔》、马尔库塞的《理性和革命》和阿多诺的《否定辩证法》等，其他著作都同样绕不开黑格尔，不过他们和黑格尔对话和缠斗的方式又因各自的理论旨趣不同而各有不同。而他们理论的成败与当代意义则取决于他们在国家与民族精神的坐标系下关于现代社会的批判和实践哲学的探讨。主要原因在于，与一般的自由主义和契约主义不同，黑格尔的根本成就在于从国家和民族精神的视角全面阐释了西方现代社会的实体性精神及其表现形式，是西方现代社会自我认识的真正完成者。因此，任何一个想要对西方现代社会展开批判的哲学家，都不得不涉及这一根本性问题。

As a pioneer of Western Marxism, Lukács once said that what constitutes the decisive difference between Marxist thought and bourgeois thought in explaining history is not the primacy of economic motives, but the viewpoint of totality, the category of totality, which gives Marxism its decisive distinction from bourgeois thought. The comprehensive and determining dominance of the category of totality over each part is the key that Marx took from Hegel and creatively transformed into a completely new science. What is meant by the category of totality is the idea of the state and the national spirit. However, the idea of the state and the national spirit do not function directly, but through two links: first, the form of mediation, which in capitalist countries is mainly manifested in laws that protect individual rights and money in the commodity exchange of civil society; second, the identification of individuals as subjects with the idea of the state and the national spirit, which is transformed into the principle of their own action.

作为国外马克思主义的思想先驱，卢卡奇曾说过，在解释历史时构成马克思主义思想与资产阶级思想的决定性差异的，不是经济动因的首要性，而是总体观点、总体范畴，使马克思主义和资产阶级有决定性的区别。而总体范畴对各个部分全面的、决定性的统治地位，是马克思取之于黑格尔并独创性地改造成一门全新科学的关键。所谓总体范畴，指的是国家理念和民族精神。不过国家理念和民族精神并不是直接发挥作用，而是通过两个环节：一是中介的形式，在资本主义国家主要表现为保护个体权利的法律和市民商品交换的货币；二是作为个人的主体对国家理念和民族精神的认同并转化为自我行动的原则。

Lukács’s achievement, as he himself summarized, is that *History and Class Consciousness* represented perhaps the most radical attempt at the time to restore the revolutionary essence of Marx’s theory by renewing and developing Hegel’s dialectics and methodology. But Lukács’s error lies in the fact that he did not fully renew Marx’s revolutionary practice according to Hegel’s dialectics. His revolutionary subject, divorced from the construction of the idea of the state and the national spirit, became what Feenberg calls the abstract world-creating “We,” or the consciousness of the proletariat. Lukács himself admitted that taking the class concept of collective action as the historical subject still carried a certain “exaggerated high pitch,” thus distancing himself from Hegel and also from Marxism, and was criticized by academia as the messianic utopianism of the left wing within the communist movement. In his later years, Lukács further criticized himself for neglecting the problem of labor when writing *History and Class Consciousness*. But the crux of the matter is that even this step is insufficient. The bourgeois idea of the state and national spirit also places great importance on labor, but only on mental labor or the abstract labor criticized by Marx in the period of *Capital*, not on labor as free time and the all-round development of the human person.

卢卡奇的成就正如他本人所总结的那样，《历史与阶级意识》代表了当时想要通过更新和发展黑格尔的辩证法和方法论来恢复马克思理论的革命本质也许是最激进的尝试。但卢卡奇的失误在于，他并没有完全根据黑格尔的辩证法来更新马克思的革命实践，其革命主体离开了国家理念和民族精神的建设，成了芬伯格所说的抽象创造世界的“我们”，或者无产阶级的意识。卢卡奇自己承认把集体行动的阶级概念作为历史主体仍然带有某种“夸张的高调”，从而因为远离了黑格尔也同样远离了马克思主义，并被学界批评为共产主义运动中左派的救世乌托邦主义。卢卡奇晚年进一步自我批评在撰写《历史与阶级意识》时忽略了劳动问题，但问题的实质在于，仅到这一步还不够，资产阶级的国家理念和民族精神也非常重视劳动，不过只重视精神劳动或者被《资本论》时期的马克思所批判的抽象劳动，而不是自由时间和人的全面发展的劳动。

Hegel seems to value only the family and the civil society of commodity exchange, but not what Gramsci later called the civil society that is the main battlefield of positional warfare. Gramsci understood the individualized struggle of culture and ideology as the practice of collective action, concerning the hegemony of culture and ideology. This can be said to have greatly enriched Hegel’s reflections and discussions on political sentiment, patriotic feeling, and folk customs. His thoughts on national-popular literature also transcended Hegel’s thinking on the national spirit of egoism and the logic of property. Unfortunately, Gramsci did not truly understand Hegel’s “formidability”: that the national spirit or so-called society is merely the result of the idea of the state being delegated and recreated. Without the struggle for state power, even if crowned with the title of the nation, it is still difficult to escape the rut of subjectivity.

黑格尔似乎只重视家庭和商品交换的市民社会，而不重视后来被葛兰西称为阵地战主场的市民（公民）社会。葛兰西将被个体化理解的文化与意识形态斗争理解为集体行动的实践，事关文化与意识形态的领导权，可以说极大地丰富了黑格尔关于政治情绪、爱国情怀和民俗习惯的思考与讨论，其关于民族—人民文学的思想也超越了黑格尔对于利己和财产逻辑的民族精神的思考。可惜的是，葛兰西并未真正明白黑格尔的“厉害”之处，即民族精神或所谓的社会不过是国家理念下放再造的结果，离开国家政权的争夺，即使被冠以民族的称号，仍然难以摆脱主观性的窠臼。

The Disjuncture between the Rational Core of the Idea of the State and National Spirit and the Revolutionary Entity Subject

国家理念和民族精神的理性内核与革命实体主体的错位

Among early Western Marxist scholars, Marcuse was relatively explicit in defending Hegel, especially when Hegel’s doctrine of the idea of the state and national spirit was attacked as a precursor to Nazi ideology. One of the main tasks of Marcuse’s *Reason and Revolution* was to refute this view. He clearly pointed out that the basic ideas of Hegel’s philosophy are hostile to the tendencies that led to the theory and practice of fascism. That is, not just any idea of the state or national spirit is what Hegel endorsed. The true core of Hegel’s idea of the state and national spirit is historical rationality. The French Revolution clearly demonstrated that reason is the ultimate force that overcomes reality. It is not reality that determines reason, but reason that governs reality. The idea of the state and national spirit with historical rationality can become reality in people’s personal and social actual life.

在早期的国外马克思主义学者中，马尔库塞是比较明确地为黑格尔作辩护的，特别是当黑格尔的国家理念和民族精神学说被攻击为纳粹主义的思想先驱时，马尔库塞的《理性与革命》主要任务之一就是驳斥这一观点。他明确指出，黑格尔哲学的基本思想与导致法西斯主义的理论和实践的那种趋向是敌对的，即并不是任何一种国家理念或民族精神都是黑格尔所赞成的，黑格尔国家理念和民族精神的真正内核是历史的合理性。法国大革命清楚地表明了理性是战胜现实的最终力量，不是现实规定着理性，而是理性主宰着现实，具有历史合理性的国家理念与民族精神能在人们的个人和社会实际生活中成为现实。

But regrettably, Marcuse only discussed historical reason abstractly and failed to truly reveal the deep problems existing in Hegel’s thought. Specifically, although Hegel’s idea of the state and national spirit is individual freedom, because this individual freedom is defined as private property and subsequently develops into the binary opposition between the big bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and because it fails to truly elucidate the rationality of a new idea of the state and national spirit whose true purpose is free time and the all-round development of the human person, it ultimately led to the rise of Nazism. And when Marcuse criticized that “in the advanced industrial society, the technical apparatus of production and distribution, due to increasing automation, does not exist as the sum total of mere instruments divorced from their social and political effects,” he was correct, but he also did not consider the possibility of a total revolution. He merely advocated a quasi-utopian student movement, the resistance of marginalized social groups, the struggles of the Third World, etc. The “Great Refusal” of late capitalism does not possess an objective, total revolutionary force.

但遗憾的是，马尔库塞只是抽象地谈论历史理性，却未能真正揭示黑格尔思想中存在的深层问题。具体而言，虽然黑格尔的国家理念和民族精神是个体自由，但由于这样的个体自由被规定为私有财产并进而发展为大资产阶级与无产者的二元对立，并且由于未能真正阐明以自由时间和人的全面发展为真正旨趣的新国家理念和民族精神的合理性，最终导致了纳粹的兴起。而当马尔库塞去批判“在发达的工业社会中，生产和分配的技术装备由于日益增加的自动化因素，不是作为脱离其社会影响和政治影响的单纯工具的总和”时，他是对的，但同样没有考虑一种总体性的革命的可能性。他只是鼓吹一种类乌托邦的学生运动、社会边缘群体的反抗、第三世界的斗争等，对后期资本主义“大拒绝”并不具有客观的总体性的革命力量。

The Rejection of the Total Program and the Regression to Social Liberal Democracy

总体性方案的拒斥与社会自由民主主义的回退

Hegel’s philosophy based on the idea of the state and national spirit was later further criticized by Adorno as a philosophy of identity of a kind of concept fetishism. That is to say, the commodity fetishism by which modern life negates all diverse social relations of life is a gift of Hegel’s intellectual violence. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why Adorno concluded that a total philosophy is not worth hoping for. This is nothing but a myth, just like the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Consequently, the logic of all revolutionary practice should completely abandon the total path of rebuilding and renewing the idea of the state and national spirit, turning instead to a continuous negative dialectics of de-identification, using a path of political pessimism and melancholy philosophy to guard against any optimistic tyranny of identity. If Hegel’s idea of the state and national spirit is complete identity, and the particularity he advocates is not true particularity but identity with the appearance of particularity—namely, the pursuit of material wealth and egoistic passion—then the unfolding of true particularity, of true individuality, is equally inseparable from the construction of the idea of the state and national spirit.

黑格尔基于国家理念与民族精神的哲学，后来被阿多诺进一步批判为某种概念拜物教的同一性哲学，也就是说，现代生活否决掉一切多样性社会生活关系的商品拜物教是拜黑格尔的思想暴力所赐。因此，我们便不难理解阿多诺由此得出结论：一种总体性的哲学是不值得期望的。这和启蒙哲学一样不过是一种神话，而所有革命实践的逻辑因此应该彻底抛弃重建和更新国家理念与民族精神的总体性路径，转向持续去同一性的否定辩证法，用一种政治悲观主义和忧郁的哲学路径去防范任何乐观主义的同一性暴政。如果说黑格尔的国家理念和民族精神是彻底的同一性，其所主张的特殊性并不是真正的特殊性，而是有着特殊性外表的同一性，即对物质财富和利己热情的追逐的话，对于真正特殊性的真正个性的展开，其实同样离不开国家理念和民族精神之建构。

No wonder Habermas categorizes the critical theory of Adorno and others as philosophy of consciousness and advocates reconstructing the foundation of critical theory with the paradigm of “intersubjective” “communication,” understanding Hegel’s philosophical paradigm based on the concept of the state and national spirit as follows: in order to reconcile a fragmented modernity, Hegel presupposed an ethical totality that did not grow out of the soil of modernity but originated from the idealization of the past in primitive Christian religious fellowship and the Greek polis. Of course, Habermas’s concept of the communicative subject does not truly possess a world-historical connotation and become a new universal paradigm of production and life; as he himself says, although it is a post-metaphysical path, it still cannot escape the contingent predicament of contract theory that Hegel criticized.

难怪哈贝马斯将阿多诺等人的批判理论统统归为意识哲学，并倡导以“主体间性”的“交往”范式重建批判理论的基础，并将黑格尔基于国家理念与民族精神的哲学范式理解为：为了调和四分五裂的现代，黑格尔预设了一种伦理的总体性，它不是从现代性的土壤中生长出来的，而是源于原始基督教的宗教团契和希腊城邦对过去的理想化。当然，哈贝马斯的交往主体概念并未真正具有世界历史的内涵，成为一种新的生产与生活的普遍范式，就如他所说的那样，虽然是一种后形而上学的路径，但仍然难以去除黑格尔所批判的契约论的偶然性困局。

Habermas later proposed a plan for multiculturalism in *The Inclusion of the Other* and *The Postnational Constellation*. Under the logic of a political community of constitutional patriotism, maintaining the diversity and difference of national cultures has in a sense already abandoned the vision of diverse national cultures reaching consensus through consultation, and to a large extent this is precisely Hegel’s plan. Unlike quietly returning from Kant to Hegel, Honneth’s “struggle for recognition” explicitly raises the banner of returning to Hegel. However, his emphasis on social freedom rather than freedom in the sense of state ethics, while maintaining the openness of normative meaning, like other Western Marxists, remains relatively weak in achieving the objectivity of normativity.

哈贝马斯后来在《包容他者》和《后民族结构》中针对多元文化提出了方案。在宪法爱国主义的政治共同体逻辑下，保持民族文化的多样性与差异性，这其实已经在某种意义上放弃了多元民族文化通过协商形成共识的愿景，并且在很大程度上恰恰是黑格尔的方案。与悄悄地从康德重回黑格尔不同，霍耐特提出的“为承认而斗争”则是明确打着重回黑格尔的旗号，但他对社会自由而不是国家伦理意义上自由的强调，虽然保持了规范性意义开放性，却和其他国外马克思主义者一样，在实现规范性的客观性方面比较乏力。

In summary, as Martin Jay judges, it is noteworthy that critical theory, including that of the early critical theorists, undermined the totalizing thought of the first generation of Western Marxists. The same process of disenchantment also occurred in France and Italy, where the concept of totality was also a central point of contention. Hegel was not a philosopher who only emphasized totality, substantiality, and the spirit of the state and nation; this is precisely the fundamental difference between him and Plato. He emphasized that if totality and individuality, substance and subject, state and individual cannot be unified, each suffers from extreme one-sidedness. In other words, any form of state institution that cannot tolerate within itself the principle of free subjectivity and does not know how to adapt to growing reason is one-sided.

总而言之，就如马丁·杰伊（Martin Jay）所判断的那样，值得注意的是包括早期批判理论家在内，批判理论破坏了第一代国外马克思主义者的总体性思想，同样的去魅过程也在法国和意大利发生了，在那里总体性概念也是争议的中心。黑格尔并不是只强调总体性、实体性和国家与民族精神的哲学家，这正是他与柏拉图的根本区别之所在。他强调了总体性与个体性、实体与主体、国家与个人如果不能相统一的话，各自都存在极大的片面性。换言之，主张一切国家制度的形式如果不能在自身中容忍自由主观性的原则，也不知道去适应成长着的理性，那都是片面的。

The Path and Possibility of Returning to Hegel and Transcending Him Anew

回到黑格尔并重新超越黑格尔的路径与可能性

Therefore, understanding Hegel as a philosopher of statism and nationalism in the general sense is biased; of course, understanding him as a liberal philosopher would be to place Hegel at the level of Kantian philosophy. For Hegel, the fundamental difficulty of the contract state or social-liberal democratic state that Enlightenment political philosophy attempts to establish lies precisely in basing the concept of the state and national spirit on the contingent foundation of the combination of individual wills. Such schemes are criticized by Hegel as abstract freedom or the “freedom understood by the intellect.” Hegel’s success lies in abandoning the binary opposition between state-nation and free individual. As Allen Wood argues, Hegel provides a vision of emancipation fundamentally opposed to liberal and individualist ideals, which shapes our imagination of society. As Michael Feola also points out, in both similarity to and divergence from liberalism, Hegel elaborates the social dimension of freedom, pointing toward an ideal community that includes modern free individuals.

因此，把黑格尔理解为一般意义上的国家主义和民族主义的哲学家是偏颇的，当然，将其理解为自由主义的哲学家则是将黑格尔置于康德哲学的高度上。对黑格尔来说，启蒙政治哲学试图建立的契约国家或者社会自由民主主义国家的根本难题，恰恰在于将国家理念与民族精神建立在以单个人意志的结合为基础的偶然性基础之一。而此类方案被黑格尔批评为抽象自由或“理智所了解的自由”的方案。黑格尔的成功之处在于摒弃了国家民族与自由个人二元对立的认知，正如艾伦·伍德所主张的那样，黑格尔提供了一个从根本上反自由主义和反个人主义理想的解放愿景，这塑造着我们对于社会的想象。也正如迈克尔·菲奥拉（Michael Feola）所指出的那样，在与自由主义的相似与背离之间，黑格尔阐发了自由的社会性维度，指向了一个将现代自由个体包含在内的理想共同体。

In fact, Hegel’s real problem lies in understanding the concept of the state and national spirit of Western capitalism as the sole model of world history. As Kurt F. Leidecker says in *Hegel and the East*: Hegel’s ideal of the union of Christianity and the state for the realization of freedom and the full unfolding of the true essence of spirit resulted in a distorted interpretation of world history, especially of the East. In the era of colonial expansion, this not only failed to attract the attention it deserved but was simply accepted and endorsed. If we truthfully explain the modern development of the East from a global perspective, the utopia contained here collapses. In other words, the problem with Hegel’s methodology is, as Lukács said, Hegel’s dogmatic interpretation of freedom and cultural spirit.

其实，黑格尔的真正问题在于将西方资本主义的国家理念和民族精神理解为世界历史的唯一样式，就如库尔特·莱德克尔（Kurt F. Leidecker）在《黑格尔和东方》中所说的那样：黑格尔关于基督教和国家为了实现自由和充分展开精神的真实本质而结合的理想，造成了对世界史特别是对东方的歪曲解释。这些在殖民扩张时代不仅没有引起应有的注意，反而干脆被接受和认可了。如果我们用全球的眼光如实地说明东方的现代发展，包含在这里的空想就站不住了。换言之，黑格尔的方法论是如卢卡奇所说，问题在于黑格尔对自由和文化精神的独断论解释。

The true wisdom possessed by Eastern civilization is its emphasis on *ren* (humaneness) and the person, on labor and the unceasing spirit of self-strengthening. This aligns with Marx’s critique of Hegel: the estate of those who have lost property and engage in direct, i.e., concrete, labor is not so much an estate within civil society as the foundation upon which the various groups of civil society rest and operate. Only through the critique of political economy, which penetrates to the foundation of civil society and discovers the secret of human history—that human beings generate themselves through labor—can we understand the whole of human history and the difficult problems of the *Lumpenproletariat* and poverty that Hegel could not solve. In other words, the real difficulty of the modern state lies in “it separates from man his objective essence as something merely external and material.” Marx believes that the whole of so-called world history is nothing but the process of human beings generating themselves through human labor, the process of nature’s coming-to-be for humanity. Perry Anderson’s criticism that Western Marxism neglects labor and the problem of human reproduction, or distances itself from the fields of materialist, historical, and political research, is incisive and penetrating. When they use a Kantian or quasi-Kantian approach to refute Hegel, their failure is already predetermined. Conversely, Marx found the true way out for the future of human history.

东方文明所拥有的真正智慧，是对人与仁的重视，是对劳动与生生不息的自强精神的强调，这与马克思对黑格尔的批判是相契合的：丧失财产的人们和直接劳动的即具体劳动的等级，与其说是市民社会中的一个等级，还不如说是市民社会各集团赖以安身和活动的基础。唯有深入市民社会基础并发现了人类史的秘密——人通过劳动生成自身——的政治经济学批判，我们才能理解整个人类史，以及黑格尔所解决不了的贱民和贫困难题。换言之，现代国家的真正难题在于“它使人的对象性本质作为某种仅仅是外在的、物质的东西同人分离”。马克思认为，整个所谓世界历史不外是人通过人的劳动而诞生的过程，是自然界对人来说的生成过程。佩里·安德森（Perry Anderson）批评国外马克思主义对劳动以及人的再生产问题的忽视，或者说远离唯物的、历史与政治的研究领域，可谓一针见血、入木三分。当他们用一种康德与近康德的方式来驳倒黑格尔时，已然注定了其失败的结局。反之，马克思为人类历史的未来寻找到了真正的出路。

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