ABSTRACT We can best understand Marx’s economic thought by seeing it as implicitly relying upon and reworking a Hegelian philosophy of history, which was deeply salvific and soteriological in its basic structure. Hegel’s philosophy of history reworked the Christian narrative of man’s fall, his redemption through Christ’s atonement, and his return to a state of reconciliation with God in the life of the Christian church. Thus, the loss of the organic form of community found in the Greek polis was a (...) fall that was atoned for in the religious alienation found in both Judaism and Christianity, where man is treated as separated from a transcendent God. The reconciliation between man and God is found, finally, in the reconciliation of the modern, rational state. Early on Marx adopted Hegel’s philosophy of history, but its basic structure remains even in his mature economic work. There he envisions the loss of the organic unity of primitive communism, and the alienation of individuals from the larger social totality of feudalism and capitalism. Under communism, however, individuals are reconciled with the larger social whole through the collective mastery of the products of labor. (shrink)

Two hundred years after its publication, The Phenomenology of Spirit (PhS) remains an enigmatic and challenging text, subject to a variety of interpretations. In this paper I seek to open up an additional interpretative space by emphasizing the influence of Hegel’s study of the Bible at the Tübingen Stift (1790–1793) on PhS. In a letter written to Schelling in 1795, Hegel had wondered what it might mean to »draw near to God.« It is the hypothesis of this paper that answering (...) that question was at least part of Hegel’s intent for PhS. (shrink)

The image of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as ‘the Prussian state philosopher’ has proven extraordinarily tenacious.1 To say that this much-repeated commonplace is hardly sustainable in the face of...