"Was Marx a Philosopher?" by Christoph Schuringa (Keywords: Capital; Hegel; Actualization; Praxis; Revolution)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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Karl Marx had a PhD in philosophy. This fact gets deployed in starkly contrasting ways. Those who are out to discredit Marxism wield it to insinuate that its founder was a murky intellectual, presumably disaffected and out of touch with the ‘real world’, in whom a murderous ideology brewed. Another group, seeking to shore up Marx’s intellectual credentials as a ‘respectable’ thinker, see it as helping to secure his place in a great tradition of European philosophy beginning with the Greeks and reaching through Kant and Hegel. While it is debatable just what significance is to be attached to Marx’s having begun as a philosopher, there is no controverting that he did initially plan an academic career in philosophy – a plan scuppered by political events just at the moment he was poised to implement it.

But, career aspirations aside, what was Marx’s intellectual relationship to philosophy, and how did this relationship play out over his subsequent life? On the one hand, the work rightly considered his most important, Capital, does not seem an obviously philosophical work. On the other hand, a proper understanding of that very work would seem to presuppose an appreciation of its author’s supposed ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s famed dialectic – and it is difficult to imagine being drawn more deeply into philosophy than a full grasp of this would demand. Indeed, the question of Marx’s relationship to philosophy is often handled as if it were equivalent to the question of his relationship to Hegel. One might also think that the markedly increased attention to Marx in the philosophy departments of the anglophone academy in recent years should be read as reflecting a growing recognition of the philosophical character of Marx’s work. But if Marx is so deeply implicated in philosophy, how is this to be squared with his sometimes highly pejorative statements about the philosophy he saw around him as his project progressed?

My attempt to answer these questions will involve suggesting that Marx’s relationship to philosophy should be given a radically different interpretation from those that have been considered until now. Opening up the space for this reading of Marx requires us to take seriously his calls, from as early as his PhD dissertation, for what he called the ‘actualization of philosophy’. The upshot will be, to the surprise of many, that Marx’s relationship to other, previous philosophers is not that of one who relies on philosophy in some partial, emulative or derivative way, but that of one who surpasses philosophical predecessors such as Kant and Hegel in philosophical terms.

To work up to this conclusion, we should begin from Marx’s own intellectual beginnings. Marx entered the University of Bonn as an undergraduate to study law, under pressure from his father, himself a lawyer. He soon relocated, however, to the metropolis of Berlin, and shifted towards philosophy. As he reported in a now-famous letter to his father, he spent a period laid up ill in bed giving vent to his frustration with the intellectual inadequacies of what he was taught by composing a vast text attempting to drill down to the philosophical foundations of law. (This text has not survived.) As his philosophical interests deepened, he would become the intellectually most brilliant member of the Young Hegelians, a group of more or less politically radical philosophers that had formed following Hegel’s death in 1831.

Marx’s doctoral dissertation, entitled Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, is a remarkable work. Both Democritus (a contemporary of Socrates) and Epicurus (a post-Aristotelian philosopher) subscribed to atomism – that is, the view that nature consists of atoms (i.e. ‘unsplittable’ smallest parts) and the void. But, Marx urged against a received view, the later philosopher was no mere plagiarist of his atomist predecessor. Instead, Epicurus was a profound thinker in his own right, who developed a distinctive view of his own and showed the way to rethinking the question of how thought relates to reality. The dissertation, as well as being a philosophical tour de force, displayed scholarly bravura. Notably, the Oxford classicist Cyril Bailey – certainly no Marxist – wrote in 1928 that the dissertation showed ‘the workings of a subtle and ingenious mind in the presence of a very difficult problem’, a verdict echoed a century or so later in 2020 by the Chicago classical scholar Elizabeth Asmis, who commented that ‘Marx took pride in his scholarship, and, I think, rightly so’.

Marx’s relationship to previous philosophers is not that of one who relies on philosophy in some partial, emulative or derivative way, but that of one who surpasses philosophical predecessors.

Marx’s examiners at the University of Jena, where he submitted the dissertation in absentia, were mighty impressed and conferred the doctoral degree on him without hesitation. His fellow Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer, notorious for his atheist reinterpretations of the Bible, had acted as something of an informal supervisor for Marx’s project and now had a job lined up at the University of Bonn for his younger but more brilliant colleague. Bauer himself had a position at Bonn teaching theology; from what survives of their correspondence we know that a component of Marx’s proposed teaching curriculum was to have been logic (presumably conceived, in a Hegelian vein, as the science of thought in its greatest generality). But just as Marx was poised to take up the position, a great repressive political wave removed radicals from their positions in the universities, including Marx’s sponsor Bauer. Marx’s prospects of academic employment consequently lay in ruins.

Marx responded by pursuing a career in journalism, writing for – and quickly rising meteor-like to the editorship of – the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a progressive newspaper. Before long, he would meet Friedrich Engels in Paris, and learn of radical French socialism. These encounters set him decisively on a new path in the mid-1840s, combining political activism with painstaking exploration of the functioning of capitalism. But what had become of Marx the philosopher? The ‘Paris Manuscripts’ of 1844 (rediscovered only in the twentieth century) still contained, in amongst material about political economy, lengthy discussions of Hegel and of the one philosopher Marx now said had performed a genuine revolution in thinking since Hegel’s death: Ludwig Feuerbach. And Marx’s well-known discussions of alienation in capitalism in the Manuscripts are plausibly read as anchored in a philosophical position called ‘humanism’, inspired by Feuerbach.

Understanding the Paris Manuscripts as still invested in philosophy, by contrast with Marx’s later work, certainly fits with a picture of his overall development introduced by the influential French Marxist, Louis Althusser. Althusser was the central figure in the intellectually charged discussions of Capital that took place at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1965 (published as Reading Capital). According to Althusser, Marx’s thinking, soon after the Paris Manuscripts, was characterized by a radical break of a distinctive kind. In Althusser’s terminology what Marx effected, in order to enter the realm of his later work, was an ‘epistemological rupture’. (This concept shares with Thomas Kuhn’s well-known notion of ‘paradigm shift’ an ancestry in the work of Gaston Bachelard and Alexandre Koyré.)

Althusser changed his mind at various points about the precise nature and timing of the rupture. But the basic idea remained: before the rupture, Marx still did philosophy in the tradition of Hegel and post-Hegelians; after it, he embarked on a new and unprecedented kind of science, the possibility of which he had brought about through the rupture. What created the intellectual space for this new science, called ‘historical materialism’, was Marx’s discovery of a completely new concept, that of ‘labour power’. Having equipped himself with this concept, Marx, unlike classical political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, was able to see that it was labour power that workers offered for sale to capitalists, not labour. Smith and Ricardo, lacking the conceptual equipment to distinguish labour and labour power, produced results that were at best confused. At worst, they simply could not get any hold on the secret of labour power – which had the unique property that it could bring more value into the world than it itself contained.

Much in Althusser’s picture is compelling. It captures the profound sense that any reader must have who has tried to traverse the gamut of Marx’s writings, of leaving behind traditional modes of thought in order to advance into unknown territory. In unpublished lectures of the time, in which he could be much more accessible, Althusser provided a searching exploration of Marx’s wrestling with the Feuerbachian heritage in the Paris Manuscripts, to complement his more forbiddingly formal published contributions. For one thing, what Althusser lays bare should disabuse any student of Marx of the notion that Marx’s relationship to Hegel is that of simply ‘inverting’ Hegel’s dialectic: flipping an entire idealist pancake so as to turn it materialist side up. Such a straightforward inversion was precisely what Feuerbach announced he was undertaking in his own work. Marx was already keenly aware of the unviability of this quixotic project in the Manuscripts. Only a little reflection will suffice to make it apparent that the notion of inversion itself delivers nothing that could explain how you could thereby get from idealism to materialism. As Althusser rightly objected, ‘to turn an object right round changes neither its nature nor its content by virtue merely of a rotation!’ After all: ‘a man on his head is the same man when he is finally walking on his feet’.

Marx, far from abandoning philosophy, was concerned to bring it into its own. In fact, he called for the actualization of philosophy.

Althusser’s work has not been to everyone’s taste. Among some Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian philosophers and economists, Althusser’s Marxism was unceremoniously labelled ‘bullshit’. But the notion that Marx had it in mind to leave philosophy in order to set sail for other shores is far from confined to Althusserians. While Althusser trumpeted Marx’s self-extrication from philosophy as at the same time founding the novel and revolutionary science allegedly expounded in his mature work, someone who could scarcely contrast more strongly with him, the American political philosopher Daniel Brudney, has argued that Marx sought to leave philosophy, again for a scientific destination, but failed to do so. Marx, according to Brudney, wanted to engage in a non-evaluative science that would demonstrate the inevitability of the overturning of capitalism without ever having to invoke ‘normative’ claims that have their natural home in philosophical ethics (such as that the alienation workers experience in capitalism is bad, and is to be remedied). But Marx, ultimately, could not manage this. He could find no way, despite himself, to make his points without invoking normative claims. Marx thus remained stuck within philosophy after all.

Both Althusser and Brudney capture something that must strike any reader of Marx. Something profound happens in the 1840s, as a result of which the whole tenor of Marx’s intellectual work seems to change radically. In his later work, the extended philosophical discussions that still characterized the Paris Manuscripts were gone. (This despite the odd reference attesting to his, by then, highly unfashionable reverence for Hegel’s logic, his protests that Hegel was being treated ‘like a dead dog’, and his self-confessed ‘coquetting’ with Hegelian turns of phrase and stylistic devices.) But I now want to suggest that this development should not be thought of as an abandonment of philosophy – whether successful, as Althusser has it, or unsuccessful, as Brudney has it. Contrary to appearances, what Marx is up to should be brought under the rubric of what he had already been calling for in his doctoral dissertation: the actualization of philosophy.

Marx, far from abandoning philosophy, was concerned to bring it into its own. A way to think of the difference that seeing Marx’s project this way makes is in terms of the famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, which states: ‘The philosophers have thus far merely interpreted the world; the point is to change it’. If we see Marx’s stance here as that of advocating for the actualization of philosophy, then he is not saying – as the Thesis is commonly read – that whereas philosophers have been concerned merely with the task of interpreting the world, which is all philosophy can do, the point is to do some other (non-philosophical) thing. He is saying instead that whereas the philosophers have thus far merely interpreted the world, the point is to do something which they should – precisely as philosophers – all along have been aiming at but which they have failed to live up to. And that is not something non-philosophical, but philosophy in its actuality.

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So what is the actualization of philosophy? The idea is, to us, an unfamiliar one. It is unfamiliar, first, because the notions of potentiality and actuality are unfamiliar. They do not belong in the empiricist paradigm that dominates contemporary thought. Marx, as an inheritor of a tradition running from Aristotle to Hegel, represents a deviation from this paradigm. But it is also unfamiliar because of the notion of philosophy in play.

Let’s begin with the notion of philosophy in play. Marx inherited from Hegel, and more remotely from Plato and Aristotle, the understanding that philosophy is not one enquiry alongside others. It is not to be ranged alongside physics, biology, history, geography, and so on, as rational enquiries each characterized in terms of its distinct object (nature, living organisms, past human action, the earth, and so on). Philosophy is not on a par with the ‘special sciences’, another science alongside them. That is because philosophy has no object: it is rational enquiry as such. As one might put it, it is science, not a science.

Marx’s understanding of philosophy is true to a great insight: all there is for philosophy to be is human thinking in its greatest generality.

If one nonetheless insisted on talking about the object of philosophy, one could employ for it a phrase like ‘all reality’, and perhaps elaborate this, in a further gestural flourish – ‘all reality, without limit’. Such expressions are gauche, because they try to capture limitlessness by trying to point to a limit placed infinitely far away, and so to a limit after all. But philosophy’s object – if we are to persist in our attempt to talk of this – really has no limit at all. Having an object that can only be described as illimitable, philosophy has no place among or alongside the special sciences. Instead, as rational enquiry as such, it articulates itself into the special sciences as required – biology when dealing with living organisms, and so on. There are not different types of rational enquiry, except inasmuch as the work of rigorous thought about living organisms directs the mind to different domains and patterns of observation and inference than does, say, geography or architecture or psychoanalysis.

Now, Hegel says of philosophy (or, strictly, of ‘the Idea’, in which philosophy culminates) that it is the unity of concept and actuality. What this means is that what Hegel calls ‘the concept’ (that is, thought in its utmost generality) shall not, so to speak, ‘stand outside’ actuality, or be sufficient unto itself. This is because it is to be the thinking of actuality as such, whereby thinking and what it thinks are identical. Actuality, after all, if it were captured in its entirety, could not leave thought somehow standing outside of it – what place could there be for thought to occupy? But, Marx alleges, Hegel fails to be true to this insight. Philosophy as Hegel actually practises it falls back into a position in which the concept is made to stand outside actuality. This comes out in Hegel’s division of philosophy into logic and Realphilosophie (the philosophy of the ‘real’, itself bifurcated into nature and spirit). Logic can supposedly accomplish itself in thought alone, in abstraction from all content. This thought – what logic allegedly accomplishes by itself – must then somehow cross over into the realm of the real. But, having cut itself off from the real, it now has no means to do this; it certainly cannot do so from within logic, and anything else will at this juncture show itself to be an arbitrary leap.

Marx effectively remains resolute in the thought, as Hegel did not, that if philosophy really is the unity of concept and actuality, then philosophy must, so to speak, call for its own actualization. The work of philosophy is, after all, the thinking of actuality. Such thinking is not a process that culminates when it reaches its completion; it is what Aristotle called an energeia, whose end is present throughout. For philosophy to be actualized is for it to accomplish the self-completion that is its end.  Philosophy as Hegel practises it, fails to be – contrary to its own concept – the thinking of actuality that Hegel, as much as Marx, says it is. It is constantly self-restricting itself to mere thought, falling short of actuality, and thereby of philosophy.

One might worry that if philosophy turns out to be coeval with human thinking activity in its greatest generality, as I am saying, that means that philosophy’s distinctiveness is obliterated. But this threatened destruction of philosophy’s claims to distinctiveness is precisely what the actualization of philosophy comes to. Marx’s understanding of philosophy is true to a great insight: all there is for philosophy to be is human thinking in its greatest generality. Such thinking will, properly and necessarily, restrict itself as it goes to specific enquiries. But such self-restriction is to be accounted for as required by its overall task, that of thinking the illimitable object. That thinking is not merely theoretical, but also (and in the first instance) practical – it is, principally, the thinking of the illimitable object that it produces and does not merely receive. Thinking in its actuality, quite literally, changes the world. The task of thinking is the task of humanity, and this task is no different from philosophy. There will be plenty of specific tasks of thought generated, many of them theoretical in nature, but philosophy will not be among them.

Thinking in its actuality, quite literally, changes the world. The task of thinking is the task of humanity, and this task is no different from philosophy.

Looked at this way, Marx’s relationship to Hegel turns out completely different from the way it is usually thought of. He does not pay philosophical homage to Hegel, but surpasses him philosophically. It is useful to remember that this is how Marx himself saw things in his early, unfinished text Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. There he complains not merely about specific moves Hegel makes, but about Hegel’s philosophical insufficiency. Hegel’s failure to carry out his project of providing a ‘logic of the state’ is a philosophical failure. And this is because Hegel, far from being the supreme practitioner of dialectic by whose standard Marx has to be measured, falls short of dialectic, properly practised. Hegel’s dialectic takes the form of what Marx liked later to condemn as ‘self-sufficient philosophy’. Such ‘self-sufficient philosophy’ is philosophy falling short of itself – falling short of the unity of concept and actuality. Indeed, it is in Capital that dialectic is properly practised. That is because here dialectic is not the imposition of a dynamism of concepts worked out in advance, in abstraction from the subject matter. It is, rather, the development of the subject matter from contradiction to contradiction. Those contradictions are real – e.g. in the way that large machinery both requires ever more workers and makes them ever more dispensable – and not merely contradictions in thought. This development projects itself into the future, in an enactment not of abstract thought but of real human thinking activity. This real human thinking activity, practical in its entirety, self-restricts itself into numerous acts of theoretical enquiry.

If Capital is philosophy, then, it is explicitly not ‘Marxist philosophy’ as this has been attempted in various guises. One such guise is that of ‘dialectical materialism’, which proclaims, among other things, that nature is governed by ‘dialectical laws’, according to which everything is contradictory, quantity turns into quality, and so on. This is not philosophy actualized, but a crude metaphysics trying to enshrine supposedly Marxist precepts in an unactualized philosophy of the most barbaric kind. The same goes for the various attempts at ‘proletarian philosophy’ that have been attempted across the ages. Such a philosophy would be a contradiction in terms, trying to enshrine bourgeois self-sufficiency as if from a proletarian standpoint.

But how can the substance of Capital, that profoundly concrete text, be that of the actualization of philosophy? Quite simply. Capital is an exercise of something indeed completely general: human thinking activity. It is, one might say, one great practical syllogism with the revolution as its conclusion. (Aristotle had already noticed that the conclusion of a practical syllogism is not a judgement, thought, or statement – but an action. This is a very difficult idea – how could a conclusion be an action? – but a profound one.) Throughout its argument, Capital restricts itself to theoretical judgements, something it does in order to engender that ‘conclusion’. What Marx has in his sights is the revolution by which humanity shall constitute itself as what it is. And the argument of Capital itself works at bringing about the revolution. If that is right, it may illustrate how Marx, far from having to borrow his philosophical fire from such ancestors as Aristotle or Hegel, raises philosophy to its highest power.

Christoph Schuringa is the author of Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (Verso, 2025). He teaches philosophy at Northeastern University London and is editor of the Hegel Bulletin.

First published online on 2nd November 2025

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