Hegel, Marx, and the English State.

Kent, Christopher

By David MacGregor. Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1992. x, 345 pp. $44.50 U.S.

Both Hegel and Marx were close students of Britain. For Hegel Britain was an historical aberration that could not be ignored because of its wealth and power. For Marx it was, at least theoretically, the norm of future historical development. Hegel followed British affairs at a distance, mainly through the press. Marx studied Britain more closely, living over half his life there, Hegel's last work was a long newspaper article analysing the reform-bill crisis of 183L Marx's great work Capital was an exhaustive and exhausting analysis of British capitalism. Given Marx's intellectual debt to Hegel, one wonders that a study such as Mary, Engels and the English State was not attempted long ago, in the noontime of Marxist and Hegelian scholarship. That it should not be written until now is perhaps one more validation of Hegel's famous dictum: "The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the fall of dusk." It certainly offers a reading of Hegel and Marx at considerable variance from old ideological orthodoxies, though less perhaps from historical reality.

David MacGregor is not an historian, but a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario. However, his book may interest historians political, social and intellectual of Britain. He begins with a discussion of Hegel's reform-bill article claiming that, contrary to the traditional view, it was not a sour mix of anglophobia and Prussian chauvinism but a shrewd analysis of the political situation as of mid-1831 which correctly identified the structural weaknesses of the existing British state, most notably its dominance by a corrupt and incompetent aristocracy, and pointed the direction that politics must take if the nation was to avoid revolution. MacGregor suggests that Hegel's prescription was largely followed (though be did not live to see this: he died of cholera in November 1831) particularly with the emergence of a small cadre of brilliant bureaucrats who embodied the Hegelian ideal of the "universal class," disinterested servants of the state who were instrumental in effecting and enforcing the reforms Britain so badly needed. Thus when Karl Marx arrived in London in August, 1849, a failed revolutionary and political refugee, he came to a country that had triumphantly withstood the revolutionary tremors of 1848. He then began Capital, his uncompleted life work, which was enormously indebted to the mountains of information in the famous parliamentary blue books, information compiled by diligent civil servants that touched on practically every aspect of national life. Particularly cherished by Marx were the six monthly Reports of the Inspectors of Factories concerning the enforcement of the Factory Acts which regulated hours and conditions of work in the textile industry.

MacGregor's attentive reading of Capital finds Marx in postures unfamiliar to those who know him only through orthodox exegesis. He quotes us a Marx who explicitly praised the Factory Acts as successful examples of state intervention, who praised the factory inspectors and especially Leonard Horner, the first head of the Inspectorate, for their zeal in protecting working class factory operatives, and who found in the larger companies, usually the better employers, evidence that "capitalist joint-stock companies as much as cooperative factories should be viewed as transition forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one' (p. 200). This Marx is, of course, of a piece with the Marx whose "whole theory . . .," according to Engel's 1886 Preface to the English edition of Capital, "led to the conclusion that, at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means' (p. 59). This could only be done by the state, which raises several problems for Marxist orthodoxy since the withering away of the state is usually seen as a central feature of Marx's historical projection. In fact the state and government intervention are powerful and positive presences in Capital, MacGregor argues, despite the significant silence of most Marxist commentators on this point. MacGregor's explanation for this difficulty is Marx's intellectual debt to Hegel, which Marxists have long (and here at least they are in agreement with Marx himself underplayed. "In the Hegelian scheme, the state becomes more prominent, not less, with the march of history" (p. 55), and the dedicated factory inspectors, members of Hegel's universal class, were among its chief agents.

MacGregor's discussion of Hegel is beyond this reviewer's critical competence. It is certainly a very '90s Hegel, one that Mrs. Thatcher would have found very "wet" indeed. This is a Hegel for whom the state is love (or perhaps Love), a Hegel who, despite the misconstructions of certain feminist scholars, was a firm feminist, on matters of property rights, marriage, and divorce. And yet, as MacGregor notes, Hegel fathered a child on a woman he refused to marry despite a promise to do so. Of course it is "the song, not the singer," that we should attend to here. Otherwise who would pay attention to Rousseau, who "casually abandoned all five of his children to probable death in foundling homes"? MacGregor is an ardent Hegelian on his own terms, who believes not only that much of the strength of Capital comes from Hegel's influence, but that much of its weakness comes from not being Hegelian enough, particularly on the question of private property where he feels Marx went badly astray. MacGregor is interesting and persuasive on this point. It is worth mentioning that MacGregor authorizes some of his very liberal interpreting of Hegel on the grounds that he was writing under censorship, and must therefore be decoded. Add to this the argument that Hegel was also a practitioner of irony, and there is some danger that the interpreter may claim something like a blank cheque.

As for how good MacGregor's history is, here the reviewer is on firmer ground. The author is generally well read in the secondary literature. He is perhaps weakest when he strains to show how accurate Hegel's analysis of unreformed Britain was. Shrewd though Hegel was on some points -- he was certainly an attentive reader of the Duke of Wellington's speeches -- his somewhat complacent and tidy-minded Prussian perspective on government prevented him from appreciating the expressive functions and dynamics of pre-1832 politics, which he too quickly wrote off as corruption. The recent work of John Brewer, Frank O'Gorman, James Vernon, Marc Baer, and others would have helped MacGregor to appreciate better Hegel's weaknesses here. Certainly the aristocracy was a persistently powerful force in British politics, a fact that surprised Hegel and Marx, and, it seems, MacGregor too. But neither they nor he appreciated the complexity and strength of the resistances to its power, of which E. P. Thompson was such a connoisseur. On the Factory Acts MacGregor is stronger. He explicitly enrols in the ranks of the "welfare-state Whigs," to use David Cannadine's label, a currently somewhat unfashionable historiographical school, but by no means a discredited one. Thus he effectively challenges some of Peter Bartrip's recent conclusions on the Factory Acts. His work fits in with the anti-laissez-faire thesis developed by O. McDonagh out of J. B. Brebner in the early 1960s, but also with the challenging arguments of Harold Perkin on the rise of the professional ideal. Finally, it is significant that MacGregor's attraction to the Hegelian ideal of the civil servant is not unrelated to his own spell as an Ottawa social policy bureaucrat in the halcyon days of our own philosopher-king, Pierre Elliot Trudeau.