ABSTRACT
The relationship between Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of the as yet unresolved problems in Marxist scholarship. It has been fashionable in certain Marxist circles to play down, or even to discount altogether, the influence of Hegel’s philosophical system upon Marx. Henri Lefebvre’s short work Le Materialisme dialectique, published in the late 1930s, set the tone for much of the subsequent, and continuing, attempt by continental Marxists to rewrite Marxism without reference to its Hegelian heritage. The term aufheben is central to Hegel’s philosophical system for it is the operative term of the dialectic as such. Hegel’s philosophy adopted and extended the distinction common in German thinking of the eighteenth century, and also manifested in Kantianism, between what was termed the Understanding, whose function it was to establish the abstract identity of concepts or ideas, and the realm of Reason, which sought to connect or unify that which the ‘Understanding’ had divided.
