34

This paper explores the “critical disciple” relationship that Marx claims to have had with Hegel at the time he was writing Capital, by focusing on the problem of the status of concepts and theoretical discourse. Using freely, for hermeneutical purposes, the three critical models developed by Marx in the course of his critique of Hegelian speculation in his 1843 manuscript Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, the paper attempts to shed light on the content of Marx’s claimed “overturning” of Hegelian dialectics. Starting from the destitution of philosophy undertaken in the 1845–1846 drafts, we show that Marx identifies, at the very heart of the Hegelian philosophical discourse, an alienated relation to the concept that we term “concept fetishism,” based on a parallel with the analysis of commodity fetishism. We then analyze the strategies implemented by Marx in Capital to put into practice the dialectical “method” elaborated by Hegel without falling back into this fetishism of the concept. From this point of view, Marx appears at the end of our analysis as a disciple of Hegel in that he takes up some of his conceptual and argumentative innovations; but he appears as a critic of Hegel as far as the status of the theoretical discourse and the concepts by means of which the thinker tries to reconstruct and make sense of the concrete aspect that he is trying to think are concerned.