ABSTRACT
The second principle of unity of Marxist work resides in the individualist character of his methodology. Here again, Marx is an inheritor of Aufklarung and of Rousseau. The idea of the reconciliation of the spirit with itself in which Hegel saw the meaning and the sense of history seemed strange to Marx-because the ‘absolute Spirit’ is presented by Hegel in a romantic and substantial manner which must shock an Aufklarer-but all the same essential. If there must be a
reconciliation, it can only be between the individual and himself, of man with his own nature (once more one finds here a conception close to that of Rousseau). As for the alienation itself, it is also the act of the individual (cf. ‘Alienation’). More exactly, alienation is the necessary effect of certain structures or social formations which, even though they are the product of human action, have the effect of rendering man a stranger to himself and the results of his actions out of line with and possibly the reverse of his intentions, desires, or needs. Even if the word alienation has been abandoned in the mature works-without doubt in part to mark the distance from the metaphysical character of the Hegelian Entfremdungthe idea is present in all of the works, whether the word is present or absent. In secularizing the idea of alienation, Marx returns to the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith. More exactly-and it is perhaps what explains Marx’s enthusiasm for economics-Adam Smith’s work and the English economists generally permit him to give an analytic content to the idea of alienation. But, at the same time, Marx reverses Smith’s model (even though the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith did not always have a benign influence) and by doing so contributes to its generalization. When individuals are plunged into certain structures of interaction and interdependence, the product of their interaction can take the form of a collective evil and possible individual evils undesirable for all or for certain individuals. Thus, capitalists can be called alienated (the word alienation is practically absent from Capital, but the idea exists under other names) in the sense that the situation of competition in which they find themselves in regard to one another leads them to step up their productivity and, in a general manner, continually to overthrow the conditions of production and, in doing this, to produce a chain reaction of ‘contradictions’ and of crises which it would be, according to the evidence, in the interest of capitalists to avoid. But in the hypothesis where a capitalist in particular tried to act in a manner calculated to avoid these crises (by abstaining from investing for example), he would not know how to avoid provoking his own elimination from the system. Thus, the competitive structure imposed by the capitalist system of production generates ‘social forces’ which dominate the individual. These forces are, and seem to him to be, exterior to him. They lead to unsought social consequences. But they can only exist through individuals. Men alone make history, even if they do not know that they are doing so, even if the history that they make is not that which they would wish to make. Capital is at once a magisterial and an eclectic work, where the language and the individualist methodology of Rousseau and political economy are utilized by Marx to construct a secular version of the Hegelian process of reconciliation. Marx’s ‘invisible fist’ alienates man from himself. But the structures which generate alienation are themselves unstable and fragile, in such a way that, on the horizon of history, can be seen the profile of the reconciliation of man with himself.
