Marx and Engels: From Interpretation to Transformation — The History of Influence
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach — “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” — became the motto of an entire tradition. We have already seen how Marx applied the dialectical method to political economy and thereby recognized social practice as a constitutive moment (cf. Chapter 2). But the history of this insight’s influence reveals a characteristic tension.
Marx himself emphasized the unity of theory and practice. The critique of political economy was not a mere academic exercise but a weapon in the class struggle. The analysis of capital relations was meant not only to explain how exploitation functions, but at the same time to show the conditions for its sublation. Theory was itself practice — not because it passes directly into action, but because it constitutes the revolutionary movement’s self-clarification.
Engels developed this perspective further, but at the same time shifted its emphasis. His popularizations of the dialectical method — above all Anti-Dühring (1878) and the (fragmentary) Dialectics of Nature — attempted to establish dialectic as a universal principle of the world. The three “fundamental laws” — the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, the negation of the negation — were supposed to hold equally in nature and society.
This systematization had far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, it made dialectic teachable and spread it through the workers’ movement. On the other hand, it created the impression that dialectic was an objective law asserting itself with natural necessity. The tension between theory and practice threatened to dissolve — not through their integration, but through deterministic reduction. If history proceeds according to dialectical laws, conscious practice seems to become superfluous.
This tension shaped further developments. The question was: how are objective lawfulness and subjective practice mediated? Is revolution the necessary result of capitalist contradictions, or does it depend on the conscious act of the proletariat? Does history follow an immanent logic, or is it open to human shaping?
The various currents of the Marxist tradition gave different answers to these questions. And each of these answers implied a particular understanding of Hegelian dialectic.