The Logic Question

Marx, Trendelenburg, and the Critique of Hegel

Bibliographic Data

ID12673237
AuthorsCharles Barbour (0000-0003-0794-0073, Associate Professor, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University Sydney Australia, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume32
Issue3
Pages252-281
Publication date2023-11-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistorical Materialism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-4466 • E-ISSN: 1569-206X
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/1569206x-bja10026
OpenAlexW4388511406
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

This paper provides a reconstruction and analysis of Marx’s early engagements with logic, and especially his studies of Hegel’s logic, on the one hand, and Hegel’s great if often overlooked critic Adolf Trendelenburg, on the other. It itemises the archival evidence that Marx read and planned to compose a Hegelian response to Trendelenburg’s devastating attack on dialectics in his 1840 Logische Untersuchungen – the work that arguably did more than any other single text to destroy the influence of Hegelianism among German intellectuals at the time. It argues that the young Marx was a more sophisticated reader of Hegel and of philosophy in general than is typically acknowledged. Against the backdrop of these claims, it then proposes a new reading of Marx’s work from 1839 to 1842 – one that takes the emphasis off the familiar distinction between materialism and idealism, which was as much an invention of Engels’s later interpretations of the early Marx as it was an invention of Marx himself, and places it instead on what early nineteenth-century thinkers would have understood to be the more comprehensive question of logic

Dialectic · Epistemology · German idealism · Hegelianism · Idealism · Materialism · Reading (process · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy and Historical Thought · Political Economy and Marxism

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