Tentative Answer: Idealist vs. Materialist Dialectics

3. Hegel’s dialectic is seen as ‘Idealist’, while Marx’s is ‘Materialist’. Marx himself says that he has ‘turned Hegel on his head’. Marx claimed that this made him more ‘scientific’. In what sense is he right?

In trying to address the sedimented layers of philosophical discourse compiled by previous thinkers, Marx often calls upon names like Bauer and Feuerbach of the Young Hegelians. This speaks to the importance of the fact that Marx's theory is largely a dual development of, and departure from, Hegel's idealist dialectic. In examining the two thinkers in conversation, it becomes easy to see the points of agreement and tension that arise from their takes on largely the same subject matter.

Hegel's teleological account of human history involves a natural progression of society through opposing lines of thought that dialectically interact with each other. Notably, he urges us to think about the progression of thought and consciousness—which is where Marx comes into disagreement. Marx instead insists on a materialist conception of history, which employs the same Hegelian teleological thinking but departs from talking about human consciousness. What progresses dialectically for Marx is the material and economic relations that structure social life. He urges us to pay attention to the economic stages of human history that build with rising class antagonisms: in this light, Marx is more 'scientific' because he uses empirical, observable evidence (i.e. circulations of capital and wealth) to back up his theory.

He furthermore 'turns Hegel on his head' with his base/superstructure metaphor, insisting that thought and consciousness only arise as a function of the material conditions of life. He at once acknowledges the validity of Hegel's teleology, but also directs him to apply it to a more central underlying element of human relations that controls the gamut of our acquirable knowledge every day. Essentially, he inverts Hegel's priorities, and places the empirical over the universal, the descriptive over the normative, and the deductive over the inductive.