Framing: Marxism in the West – Between Party Loyalty and Critical Distance
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Why this chapter at this point?
The preceding chapters of Part III dealt with Marxism where it functioned as state philosophy – in the Soviet Union and the GDR. But Marxism also existed in the West: in the communist parties of France, Italy, and West Germany, at universities, and in intellectual circles.
These Western European Marxists do not belong to the “Western Bloc” in the sense of Part II. They were in dialogue with the Eastern Bloc, partly adopted its readings, and were shaped by the communist parties – even though they lived geographically in the West. The Frankfurt School (Chapter 7) was rejected by them as “bourgeois”; conversely, Adorno and Horkheimer considered party Marxism dogmatic.
The dividing line thus does not run geographically but along the question: To whom did one feel one belonged? The thinkers treated here felt themselves – whatever their individual criticisms – to belong to the Marxist movement, not to the liberal West.
The cultures and their formative influences
Each country developed its own Marxism out of its own history:
France: The experience of the Résistance, the strong PCF (French Communist Party), the intellectual tradition running from Sartre to Althusser. French Marxism was theoretically ambitious, often structuralist in orientation, and wrestled with the question: How does science relate to politics?
Italy: The Gramscian legacy, the largest communist party in Western Europe (PCI), the tradition of the “historic compromise.” Italian Marxism was politically oriented, asked about hegemony and civil society, and developed its own critique of Hegel.
West Germany: The split between the Frankfurt School and philosophers close to the DKP (German Communist Party), the proximity to the GDR, the question of German division. West German party Marxism stood in Adorno’s shadow and had to assert itself against his hegemony.
This diversity is not a defect but a richness. Each tradition worked on the same questions – dialectics, history, practice – but out of its own particular experience. Anyone who wants to understand Marxism must understand this plurality.