Der Weltgeist ist, aber ist keiner, ist nicht Geist [The world spirit is, but is nobody, is not spirit]—Adorno, Negative Dialektik

In his rich, interesting and highly original new book, Arash Abazari argues that critical theorists should take Hegel's Logic seriously. Though the Logic is usually read as an a priori work of metaphysics or transcendental philosophy, Abazari thinks it is best approached as an empirically grounded social theory. This is already a bold claim, likely to raise eyebrows among Hegel scholars. Yet Abazari goes even further, arguing that the specific social theory that Hegel's Logic contains is one that is not customarily attributed to Hegel at all. For Abazari, Hegel's Logic (implicitly?) contains a critique of capitalism. What is more, this is a critique proceeding along much the same lines as the one found in Marx's Capital. Hence, Abazari reads the Logic as deviating from Hegel's official position from the Philosophy of Right (another respect in which his approach is highly unorthodox). In that work, Hegel praised the modern market economy as a sphere of social freedom. Yet Abazari regards this view as hopelessly antiquated, urging that we look elsewhere in Hegel's corpus for a less rosy depiction of the modern social order (2). Abazari proposes to extract from the Logic a different and darker vision of the modern market economy as a system of class-based domination and oppression. In technical terms familiar from Hegel's Logic, capitalism is a system in which the ‘appearance’ of freedom and equality masks a very different ‘essence’.

I expect it will come as a great surprise to many readers of Hegel's Logic that this work criticizes capitalism—or is even about capitalism at all. Nor does one need to be a Hegelian defender of modern society, an advocate of ‘reconciliation’, in order to entertain doubts on this score. Even among critical theorists themselves, Abazari's view of the Logic can be controversial. Beginning with Marx himself, these figures have often viewed the Logic with suspicion. They have seen it as the paradigm of a form of idealism that is the exact inverse of their own materialist view. The Logic, they think, lays the groundwork for a view of nature and society as products of thought.Footnote ¹ Whereas, the central tenet of the Marxian view is that (social) being is prior to (social) consciousness. Hence the need for adherents of the Marxian view to set Hegel, who had been standing on his head, back on his feet again. Yet Abazari departs from even this received view, insisting that the Logic is a vital resource for critical social theory.

In emphasizing how unorthodox Abazari's project is it is important to distinguish it from another closely related one. Abazari is not simply claiming, as others have, that there are resources in Hegel's Logic which were important to the Marxian critique of capitalism (ones that might still be important to critical theorists). The various connections between the Logic and Capital have been documented before: for example, the parallel between Hegel's essence-logic, on one hand, and the Marx's analysis of the relationship between the wage-contract and exploitation, on the other.Footnote ² What is innovative in Abazari's account is his conviction that there is a more intimate relationship between these projects than has generally been appreciated.

The relationship proves difficult to characterize, and my first question is how, exactly, Abazari means for us to conceive of it. For Abazari, there seems to be an underlying continuity, even an odd kind of identity between the Logic and Capital (provided we bear in mind, with Hegel, that identity presupposes, rather than excludes, difference). It is not just that Hegel's speculative philosophy informs the later critique of capitalism but that Hegelian philosophy, rightly understood, already contains this critique. Like thought and extension in Spinoza, both the Logic and Capital are attributes of the same substance. As Abazari is aware, Spinozists have often faced scepticism about the doctrine of attributes: more specifically, about the idea that God or Substance must express itself in an infinite number of distinct attributes. By the same token, we might ask of Abazari how the underlying position gains from being expressed in these two distinct idioms. Spinoza could answer that expression in an infinite number of attributes could adequately glorify God or do justice to his power. However, it is not entirely clear how this rationale carries over to the materialist perspective of critical theory.

Even granting that Hegel's logic-metaphysics and Marx's Capital are complementary, however, there is a difficult question about just what the division of labour is meant to be between the two works. In more polemical terms, one wonders what Abazari's answer would be to a critical theorist fully convinced of the social-scientific theory found in Capital, but sceptical of the value of Hegel's Logic. If the latter simply provides a new idiom in which to express the same underlying theory, then it is redundant at best (the idiom of Hegel's logic is notoriously obscure). If there are substantive differences between the two, then we seem to be committed to the idea that there is some type of philosophical deficit in the Capital project that only Hegel's Logic can fill. This second option will only be appealing to the extent the projects are defined in such a way that they are already far apart, with the Logic being an a priori work of metaphysics and Capital one of empirical social science (of course, this conception of Marx and Hegel's projects makes the prospects for marrying the two dim). Understandably, Abazari rejects this received view and, in effect, collapses the two works into one another. Even respecting this point, it is not clear why either would be inadequate on its own.

There is a more obvious problem, namely, the risk of anachronism: can Hegel, a Continental European observer of capitalism's rise, be credited with Marx's hard-won insights into the mature form it would later take in England? Here, my knowledge of the history is insufficient, though I note in passing that it is an issue which divides critical theorists. For Adorno and Horkheimer, who replace the time-bound category of ‘capital’ with the trans-historical one of ‘enlightenment’, even Ancient Greek texts can be read through the lens of critical theory: for example, Odysseus can be considered the first bourgeois, with his gesture of tying himself to the mast so as to hear the sirens’ song serving as an encapsulation of the entwinement of Eros and Thanatos in bourgeois society.Footnote ³ Yet other critical theorists may insist, following Marx himself, upon a starker periodization. This would involve the distinction between the three great modes of production—slavery, feudalism, capitalism—and, perhaps even within capitalist epoch, upon distinctions between the ‘simple commodity production’ of the English countryside and full-blown factory production for a world market.Footnote ⁴

Yet while there are difficulties in understanding how Hegel's Logic can be ‘rehabilitated’ for critical theory, I do not think they significantly undermine Abazari's fascinating, original work. Indeed, the project is all the more compelling for the risks it takes, something increasingly rare in the hyper-professionalized milieu of Anglophone philosophy. In pursuing this non-standard interpretation of Hegel's Logic, Abazari's book is essentially unprecedented in the Anglophone literature. Yet while I was ultimately convinced of the fruitfulness of Abazari's approach to understanding Hegel's Logic, I do favour a slightly different case for it than he does. The case I favour derives from the Frankfurt School, meaning Abazari may have some affinity for it. This relies heavily on the idea that any critique of capitalism that Hegel's Logic expressed would have to be ‘unconscious,’ in a sense I will need to clarify.

Would Abazari agree with this broad thesis, underdeveloped as it is? I am unsure. On one hand, Abazari does not seem to maintain that the anti-capitalism of Hegel's Logic is at all overt. Nearly always, it is Abazari himself who must apply the Logic's arguments to the topics of Marx's Capital: for example, taking an abstract logical category like ‘opposition’ [Gegensatz] and applying it to a concrete social phenomenon like class-struggle. I think Abazari would have to concede that there is little to no evidence Hegel himself was already interested in making such applications. Perhaps this is an oversimplification. After all, Hegel understands his logical categories to range over the whole of what is: life, matter, God, freedom, history, language, culture the State and so on. Yet economic phenomena in general, and capitalism in particular, are seldom, if ever, explicitly mentioned. Nor, unless I am mistaken, does Abazari claim that it was the historical Hegel's conscious intention for his Logic to serve this subversive purpose. This is understandable, since many of Hegel's own remarks about the Logic do not seem to help Abazari's case (for example, Hegel's famous claim that the Logic concerns ‘God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit’.) (SL: 29/WL: 21: 34).Footnote ⁵

At least in the Introduction, Abazari's official case for his position rests on some passages from Hegel that seem to invite a reading of the Logic as more socially engaged and empirically-grounded (for example, Hegel's description of his logic as a ‘realm of shadows’ or the comparison he makes between logic and grammar) (7). To my mind, this evidence is insufficient. That the logic is ‘the realm of shadows’, and that this invites the question of what exactly it is the shadow or reflection of – so much we can grant. But that it is modern capitalism, understood along Marxian lines, which casts the shadows on the Logic's pages? This is going too far. There is hardly a shred of evidence Hegel thought this. Yes, the logic is likened by Hegel to the grammar of a language; depending on one's view of grammar this can suggest the Logic is secondary or derivative (one's view of grammar had better not be Chomskyian).Footnote ⁶ But it does not follow that Hegel is re-tracing in his Logic the structure of modern capitalism as depicted in Capital.

In my view, there are better resources for defending Abazari's approach, ones found in the writings of a figure who is an almost constant presence in his book: Adorno. Adorno held that great works of modern philosophy could be read as responding to the rise of capitalism, regardless of whether the authors themselves would acknowledge this. For Adorno, modern society is a totality whose parts can only be understood in relation to the whole. Hence, works of philosophy, as cultural or intellectual products, need to be related back to the prevailing mode of production. However, the responses they contain are, in effect, unconscious.

Here, psychoanalysis steps in to do crucial work that orthodox readings of Marx cannot. The responses of great philosophical works to the rise of capitalism are, in Freudian terms, the ‘latent content’ disguised behind the ‘manifest content’. That the unconscious is a repository of formative experiences of power (and of social relations) makes this approach more plausible still. This is especially so if one takes the decisive step which enabled Frankfurt School authors to relate Freud's account of the genesis of the self to Marx's historical materialism: more specifically, their decision to see the nuclear family as continuous with power-structures in the wider society. If the family is economically conditioned and historically contingent, then so too are the personality structures that it generates.

In this response, I mostly sidestep the issue of whether a Marxian interpretation of Hegel's Logic is (or could ever be) accurate. In a sense, this would be beside the point, since it seems to me that any liberties Abazari takes with the text are more than compensated for by the philosophical value and interest of what results. In this respect Abazari's book on Hegel resembles those of Kojève (Reference Kojève, Bloom and Nichols1980) and, more recently, Brandom (Reference Brandom2019). These are works that risk interpretive plausibility for intellectual reward; and the trade-off has generally been deemed well worth it, as such works have often become classics. That is true in the case of this rich and interesting work as well (which I also expect to be widely read and deeply admired). If Abazari's engaging philosophical project is irreconcilable with the demands of mainstream scholarship on Hegel, then one wants to say—so much the worse for those demands.

The originality of Abazari's Hegelian position stands out most clearly when it is contrasted with the analytical Marxism so important to Anglophone reception of Marx in recent decades. Indeed, Abazari himself draws this contrast, focusing on the issue of methodological individualism (2020: 112 ff). Analytical Marxians like Elster have insisted on the need to reconcile Marx's thought with an important precept of modern ‘bourgeois’ social science: methodological individualism—the idea, very roughly, that social phenomena are fully explained by the facts about individual human beings. Of course, Marx himself appears to have followed Hegel in embracing the contrary view, methodological holism. Yet in the eyes of analytical Marxians, this form of holism is unacceptably anti-scientific.

In particular, holism in the social sciences can seem to entail the existence of an irreducible quasi-occult or mystical force that transcends the flesh-and-blood human beings who make up society. In all likelihood, the analytical Marxists were thinking of Hegel when they distanced themselves from this extravagant and implausible form of holism: in particular, the idea, familiar from Hegel's introduction to his lectures on world history, of a divine, ‘world spirit’ realizing its providential aims ‘behind the backs’ of individuals (an idea referred to under the head of ‘the cunning of reason’ [List der Vernunft]). If this is indeed Hegel's position, then the hopes for holism would seem dim. Yet Abazari argues that holism deserves a second look, and urges that we read Hegel in a more charitable way.

In outlining this more appealing form of Hegelian-inspired social holism, Abazari invokes the contrast between mechanism and teleology so important to Kant's third Critique and to all of post-Kantian German idealism (2020: 114). The contrast is relevant because methodological individualism is often presented in mechanistic terms. Society, like a machine, must be broken down into its constituent parts if it is to be properly analysed and understood. Since it has borne fruit in other areas of the sciences, mechanism of this kind seems likely to do so in the social sciences as well. Mechanism is reductionist in that it denies that there are facts about society over and above the facts about the individuals who compose it. The alternative, teleological or ‘purposive’ approach is anti-reductionist—but everything turns on how this is understood.

On one implausibly strong version of the view, rejected by Abazari, teleology involves an appeal to a completely separate set of laws and forces than those which hold at the lower mechanistic levels. The living organism is said to achieve its purposes of survival, growth and self-maintenance through exercising some type of ‘vital force’ (élan vital). What is more, this vital force is completely autonomous. It operates independently of the laws of physics and chemistry that govern the atoms and molecules making the organism. Notoriously, there is a problem about how to reconcile these two sets of laws when their predictions conflict. Hence, the teleologist seems to be forced to insist that the organism violates the laws of physics. In this regard, teleology seems no better off than dualism, with its belief in an immaterial soul. Clearly, the history of science has not been kind to this type of anti-reductionism. Again and again, appeals to irreducible forces or qualities have been defeated by the atomist's simple strategy of explaining the structure and behaviors of wholes by breaking them down to their component parts. Why, then, should matters be any different in the social domain, the complaints of a few Hegelian hold-outs notwithstanding?

Thankfully, there is a better way of understanding teleology open to the Hegelian critical theorist. On this view, descending from Aristotle and revived in Kant's third critique, teleology and mechanism can be complementary, rather than antinomially opposed. The idea is that the ends or purposes invoked by teleological or final-causal explanation are achieved in and through the chains of efficient causation invoked by the mechanistic approach. Hence, a teleological approach to societies, though holist in viewing societies as more than the sum of the individuals who make them up, would not treat them as wholly transcending the individuals who make them either (in the way that an occult force or mystical entity or ‘world spirit’ would). What is more, this form of purposiveness is a purely internal affair, a matter of the essence or nature of the entity in question. It does not rely on any appeal to intelligent design.

According to Abazari, Hegel's Logic of Essence can be approached as a defense of this more moderate type of social holism. More specifically, Hegel will argue for this view by showing that it is the mean between two unacceptable extremes. Using Abazari's labels, these are the extremes of ‘emanitistic idealism’ and ‘pure phenomenalism’. (93) The former, often erroneously imputed to Hegel himself, treats (social) reality as something that radically transcends the empirical facts about it. In addition to its unacceptable theological implications—a God separate from the world, an infinite that is finite vis a vis the finite—this view renders the connection between reality and appearance inscrutable (93). The latter position, associated with positivism, treats (social) reality as reducible without remainder to the individual, perceptible facts. Yet this disregards the dispositional properties of (social) reality, which may not manifest themselves to perception: for example, the crisis-prone nature of capitalism which only expresses itself periodically (93–94).

According to Abazari, Hegel's Essence Logic is a cautionary tale about what happens when we choose either of these extremes: specifically, the opening sections criticize various ‘one-sided’ misconceptions of the essence appearance relationship (92). Ultimately, the essence-logic makes the case for concepts from the history of philosophy like actuality (Aristotle) and Substance (Spinoza). Actuality overcomes the Platonic dualism between the world of forms and the world of appearances, the intelligible and the sensible. Substance, expressing itself in infinite attributes and modes (ways), overcomes the dualism between God and nature, as well as that between thought and extension which Descartes had considered two separate substances as opposed to two attributes of one. As Abazari is careful to note, Hegel's (social) ontology cannot be unproblematically equated with either position. However, both concepts exemplify how to avoid an overly stark dualism between inner and outer, essence and appearance, matter and form, and so on. In other words, they allow for Abazari's desired via media between ‘emanitistic idealism’ and ‘pure phenomenalism’ (93).

Often, this compromise is achieved through re-describing static categories of traditional metaphysics and religion in dynamic or processual terms. What is fundamental in reality is neither an underlying static thing nor its perceptible properties, which change. It is, rather, the whole extended process of these accidents arising and passing away, so that the substance is nothing more than their vicissitudes. This is an elusive idea I am not sure I fully understand— but it does seem to me that Abazari's Hegel (as well as his Marx) embraces some type of process-ontology.

The Hegelian-holist notion of totality Abazari extracts from the Essence Logic turns out to be well-suited to understanding capitalism as Marx described it in Capital. In particular, it helps us understand the relationship between production and consumption (circulation), summed up respectively in the famous formulae M-C-M′ and C-M-C (4.2 ‘The Dialectical Unity of Production and Circulation’). Under capitalism, production is of primary importance (2020: 122). The dominant imperative of this mode of economic life is to maximize profit. The latter, in turn, derives from extraction of surplus value from the surplus labour performed by workers for owners.

What, then, is the relationship between production and consumption? Here controversy looms. Beginning after the French Revolution and down to the present day, socialists have long criticized liberals for focusing excessively on justice in distribution.Footnote ⁷ The latter have focused only on achieving an equitable distribution of resources, and leaving capitalist mode of production untouched. Any such approach, socialists insist, would be futile, since the mode of production under capitalism effectively ensures an unequal distribution. For socialists, production is primary, not just under capitalism but under any mode of production. Yet matters are not so simple. Production would not realize its profits unless the commodities produced were brought to market for sale by the owners. So whereas before it seemed as if circulation was subordinate to production, now the reverse seems to be the case.

It is here that Abazari believes the Hegelian-holist notion of totality can shed new light. Consider the way in which Spinoza's substance causes its modes, which are little more than the ways in which it exists. This causation, then, cannot be causation of one thing by another distinct from it (here, Hume's claim that cause and effect are distinct existences). It is, rather, a type of self-causation characteristic of the causa sui. If I understand him correctly, Abazari claims for production, or capital, a similar status. It is the primary element in a structure, neither fully separable from it, nor exhausted by it in any simple sense.

Famously, Hegel rejects Spinoza's conception of the Absolute as substance, arguing that it must further be conceived as subject. Yet when one follows Marx in adopting a less affirmative view of social reality than Hegel's own, one is left with something more Spinozistic (an ‘automatic subject’, by no means auonomous, self-conscious and free, but almost robotic) (2020: 130-31). Abazari's denial that Catpital is a subject in the affirmative, Hegelian sense sets his account apart from others.

My first major misgiving about Abazari's account is that I am not sure he has fully succeeded in dispelling the obscurity surrounding methodological holism. For my part, I found the notion of totality Abazari invokes to be ambiguous, paradoxical--even self-contradictory. Is the (social) whole something over and above its parts? The answer Abazari give seems to be: yes and no. It is neither radically separate from the parts, nor wholly reducible to them either. Of course, Hegelian critical theorists may see this is a sign that all is well. They tend to praise this type of ambivalent stance in terms reserved for the highest and most rigorous forms of thought: ‘dialectical’, vernünftig rather than verständlich, grasping the ‘unity of opposites’ rather than ‘clinging to the antithesis’ and so on. Still, it is precisely this in-between space I would be interested to hear more about, since it seems so obscure to me. Abazari seems aware of its strangeness when he rejects common models of totality. For Abazari, no spatial or visual representation will suffice: ‘the whole is like an invisible ground that constitutes individuals’ (91). Here, I am a bit conflicted about the way Abazari settles on the ‘invisible’ as the solution to an antinomy of social thought. Is this appeal to ‘the invisible’ an apt account of those elusive social phenomena which seem neither straightforwardly natural nor supernatural, neither empirical nor a priori? Or is it simply a further mystification, an unwelcome Hegelian remainder that ought to have been purged?

In expressing skepticism about the notion of totality, as Abazari defines it, my aim is not to reassert the form of reductionism Abazari rightly decries. One does not need to be a reductionist to have difficulty with the idea of capital as both inherent in social facts and somehow standing behind and causing them. Nor is the problem of accounting for this intermediate option limited to critical theory. As Tuomo Tiisala indicates, Foucault may have a similar problem with such discourse, which seem to both derive from and yet explain the data (Reference Tiisala2015).Footnote ⁸ Has Abazari, then, succeeded in capturing the status of the deepest forces governing social reality by introducing a subtle distinction between ‘emanationism’ and ‘phenomenalism’? Or is there no genuine option here? Is the in-between space he describes simply empty, so that ‘emanationist’ idealism and ‘phenomenalism’ are the only legitimate choices? Perhaps, as regards the in-between space Abazari identifies, there is no there there. With all due respect to Aristotelians, not every pair of extremes has a virtuous mean between it. Sometimes the extremes are all we have.

I am concerned that Abazari is less sensitive to the difficulties in the notion of totality than he might be, and the reason may have to do with his affinity for critical theory. Very often, one finds in these thinkers a position structured so as shield the notion of totality from the critical scrutiny it requires. The position combines two components: first, a non-negotiable attachment to some form of historical materialism, not argued for in any great detail but simply assumed (whether because Marx is thought of as a scientific revolutionary in the way Newton was or because one is writing for other members of the institute among whom agreement on this basic point can be assumed); and, second, the idea that a form of social holism deriving from Hegel, whatever its problems, is what this position entails -- so that one no more needs an explanation of how capital could ensoul us than one would need an explanation of how forces like gravity can engage in ‘action at a distance’.

Apart from Hegel's Logic, an important inspiration for Abazari's third way is Adorno's intervention in the Positivismusstreit. Adorno insists (dialectically) on the ‘identity-within-difference’ of social facts and the social totality (82 ff). Yet this affinity points up another similarity between the two authors that may constitute a point of vulnerability, or at the very least clarify the structure of the argument. Abazari and Adorno both seem to presuppose the truth of critical theorist's view of society and do not argue for the latter in any sustained way. Non-critical theorists will not find any arguments directed at convincing them here. The quarrels Abazari has with Elster et al. are friendly ones among critical theorists, not ones between these figures and their ideological opponents.

To be clear, I am not accusing Abazari (or Adorno) of dogmatism, and I acknowledge that no author can argue for everything from the ground up. However, I do think it is this author's commitment to critical theory that explains his willingness to entertain the elusive notion of totality rather than the reverse. Obscure as it is, the notion of totality is in effect forced on us by the fact that it is the (social) ontology required to accommodate capital, neither a ‘world-spirit’ nor an observable phenomenon. Yet supposing one is not already some kind of critical theorist, one finds no additional reason here to be a holist.

In a certain sense, this approach is refreshing. Much recent social ontology in the analytic tradition abstracts completely from political questions, as if the question of the nature and status of social reality and the objects it contains were a purely theoretical one (‘What makes this a Stop sign, as opposed to a steel pole with an octagonal piece of tin on the end?’). Abazari's is a more partisan and polemical approach, but one which, it seems to me, presupposes the truth of critical theory. Abazari asks how the Marxian analysis of capitalism can hold good, but never seriously entertains doubts that it does. No unbeliever will have a conversion experience in the face of his project. Yet there is a drawback to this approach. Confronted with Abazari's insistence that Marx's analysis of capitalism and social holism stand or fall together, some may reject both. This seems to have been the stance of a figure like Popper, who viewed holism and (left) Hegelianism as companions in guilt.

A second issue I want to raise is that of how holist one wants to be, assuming one rejects methodological individualism. In particular, why embrace a conception of ourselves as subordinate to capital? Why not instead emphasize a slightly less abstract though still very general entity: the capitalist class?

Abazari's project displays a clear preference for the idea of capital, and not capitalists, as the driver of historical development and the source of society's structure. In this respect, he differs from left-wing politicians of today. Sanders, Jacobin and AOC, typically direct their ire at capitalists (the 1%, the billionaire class), probably because it is a clearer target. Capital, however, does not figure in their rhetoric. It is probably something much more elusive and abstract. It is not a person, nor even a group of people, but ‘self-valorizing value’, e.g., money that begets more money. What is gained (or lost) by primarily criticizing capital—and only secondarily capitalists?

This is not just a question of strategy or tactics, but one bearing on the disputes in social ontology in which Abazari intervenes. Some have argued that Marx's social ontology, though by no means methodologically individualist, constitutes a holism of a different and radically non-Hegelian sort.Footnote ⁹ This is a holism in which it is a scheme of relations which precede and determine the identities and interaction-patterns of individuals, not a meta-subject or quasi-meta-subject such as Capital. Abazari acknowledges that the relation between capitalist and worker is internal, but embeds this internal relation in a more comprehensive structure (totality). Yet there are some critical theorists who do not ascend quite this high in their effort to overcome methodological individualism, perhaps because of the worry that a meta-subject is incoherent or perhaps simply because it seems so disempowering. What is Abazari's response to them?

In prioritizing capital, one would be following Marx's lead (the latter describes the capitalist as little more than ‘capital ensouled’). However, Abazari also seems to be at an extreme end of a spectrum between the humanist and ‘anti-humanist’ or Althusserian interpretations of Marx. Interestingly, Abazari's position is a counterexample to the oft-asserted equivalence humanist interpretations of Marx are those that emphasize the Hegelian heritage: for example, those stressing the theme of alienation in the early Marx, and Romantic or Christian tropes of loss and recovery. Abazari's Marx, for whom the world Spirit is the world market, remains both anti-humanist and deeply Hegelian. What is more Abazari very skilfully shows how the later Marx's conception of human beings as mere ‘character masks’ for the interests of their class is anticipated by Hegel. In particular, Abazari stresses the latter's notion of individuals as accidents of social substance (‘epiphenomena’). Still, the result is a picture on which individuals are so impotent in the face of capital that even its chief beneficiaries, the capitalist class, must obey capital's whims.

Abazari does not deny the huge disparities in power between capitalists and workers. The latter, owning nothing but their labour power, are forced to work for the owners of the means of production and merely subsist (relative to the historically prevailing definition of subsistence). The former profit, re-invest and profit more accumulating vast fortunes. Yet it is capital that is sovereign, not capitalists. Self-valorizing value will find the class it needs to reproduce itself, and thwart anybody who stands in its path. Hence, even the people usually thought to be this system's main beneficiaries do not control it. This is not just because each of them, as an individual, has limited control. As Marx observes, even the most benevolent capitalist, acting with the best of intentions for his workers, must appease capital or go under. What is decisive, in the end, are the interests of the capitalist class. Yet Abazari's account suggests the need to take things a step further. What is decisive, in the end, are the interests of capital.

What makes this state of affairs not simply discouraging but downright uncanny is that the form of power described is almost completely anonymous; it ultimately resides not with any human being or group of them but with a kind of impersonal thing-like entity (capital). Of course, there is no deep mystery about how human beings could be ruled by forces beyond their control, such as gravity or other laws of nature. Yet capital is a product of human decision and will, a creature of our conventions. It is eerie to contemplate how something which owes its very existence to us and our conventions could come to rule us so effectively.

Marx does, at times, help his readers with an analogy to religion. There, products of the human brain come to rule over their creators. It is tempting to dismiss the idea of the socially constructed as causally efficacious, as if nothing like capital or ‘the Gods’ could genuinely be part of the causal order (matter and force as they are described in physics). However, Marx seems to accept the idea that the socially constructed is causally efficacious—even, in a sense, potently so. Those fanciful passages from the ‘Commodity Fetishism’ section of Capital in which Marx seems to describe commodities springing to life and dancing, and which inspired Kracauer's film adaptation of Capital cannot be dismissed as rhetorical excesses. The animistic religion of the primitive peoples and the truth of dialectical materialism converge on this point. Under capitalism, the situation is the reverse of what we commonly suppose: it is things which fraternize with one another, and people, their so-called ‘owners’, who are dragged along behind them. Indeed, it is not simply that commodities are our peers, but that they are our masters. It is they who bring us to market, and not the reverse.

This leads me to another major misgiving about Abazari's project, though it could be seen as little more than an application of the first concerning totality in general. I am not sure I find in Abazari's book a true explanation of how something so uncanny as capital's reign over its creators could persist. I find, rather, various ways of redescribing this bizarre state of affairs. Once we see that individuals, classes, nations are mere playthings of capital, self-valorizing value, it is natural to seek the conceptual resources to express the kind of structure at work here. We need terms like totality, substance, organism (Naturzweck), causa sui, and so on, in order to describe self-causation at work. In such a structure one element dominates others from which it is not neatly or completely separable, somewhat like Baron von Munchhausen lifting himself up by his hair. Yet I wonder if Abazari offers any new resources for responding to the sceptical worries that lead philosophers to doubt the existence and coherence of such a structure.

The move from an extravagant ‘world spirit’ holism to a more modest ‘organic’ holism may not be sufficient to dispel the mystery. Recovering the idea of an organism from Kant's demotion of it to the status of the merely regulative was a hard-won victory of the German idealists. The common-sense idea that living things exist will not suffice. Kant doubted the concept could yield cognition, since it seemed to violate the conditions on the possibility of experience: more specifically, the thought of an organism seemed to involve a form of reciprocal dependence of parts that violated the unidirectional nature of the schematized category of causality. Many modern social theorists second Kant when they press worries about the viability of totality. Abazari shows that the model here is the organism, rather than the world-spirit — but it is hard not to wonder if the hard-nosed ‘bourgeois’ social theorists he cites would find the former any less rebarbative than the latter.

As a Hegelian, Abazari appears intent on remaining rationalistic, if not necessarily atomistic or individualistic (Hegelian-Critical Theory is still a rationalist project, even if not in exactly the same way as analytic Marxism was meant to be). Still, I ask whether whether Abazari, in his debate with Elster, faces up to the real difficulties. The main one I see is the following: organicism about society is no less contentious from a methodological individualist point of view than the extravagant form of ‘spiritualism’ Abazari rightly rejects. A question for Abazari, then, is why the appeal to the organic does not raise similar issues? The problem becomes especially acute when we recall the uncanniness of the idea that capital, our own creation, should assume near-total independence of us, and then proceed to subjugate us so thoroughly. Once more, I worry that appeals to social holism do not so much solve the mystery as re-describe it. Of course, it is possible I am just too attached to my bafflement in the face of capital's transubstantiations, its incarnations and resurrection. Perhaps, like Newton, Darwin or Einstein, Marx is the kind of scientific revolutionary whose new paradigm renders such doubts obsolete.

A final issue: I am curious why Abazari omits any account of the ideal future society that Marx envisioned: a socialist one, a ‘community of free producers’. Perhaps this is related to my previous misgiving. It may be that Abazari's lack of interest in a socialist alternative may reflect his rather pessimistic, anti-humanistic conception of capital as essentially all-powerful.

To be sure, Abazari explains why a capitalist society, as described by Marx, could never make the transition from Essence to Concept, substance to subject, ‘power’ to ‘freedom’ ‘violence’ to ‘free love’ and ‘blessedness’. Yet Marx himself thought capitalism would yield its place to socialism, albeit through violent crises and revolutionary transformations. Abazari does, at certain points, discuss crisis theory, but does not seem interested in the question of whether resources from Hegel's Logic help us understand Marx's ideal of a ‘community of free producers’. So what has become of this ethical ideal?

A concluding suggestion: perhaps Hegel's thought, even Hegel's Logic, is not as irrelevant to the project of envisioning an ideal future society as it might seem. Though it seems hard to reconcile the left-Hegelian ‘to each according to his needs’ with Hegel's ‘rational state’, Abazari does not allow the other rebarbative elements of Hegel's position to dissuade him from his project. So it is unclear why he should have been dissuaded from attempting a logic of solidarity. Suppose one denies, as Abazari does, that capital is a genuine subject, as opposed to an automatic one. Then the possibility is opened up of exploring other ways in which society might assume the shape of a true subject. This would not necessarily be the ‘utopian’ form of thinking of the sort proscribed by Marx.

Here, we ought to recall a point made by Rosen, namely, that capital is not the only subject operating under capitalism. There is also the admittedly un-self-conscious, dispersed collective subject Marx calls ‘collective labour’ (Reference Rosen1996: Ch. 6 § VIII ‘Unified Labor’). It is sometimes said that Marx's revolution would replace the ‘automatic’ subject of capital with the true one of social labour, producing a society in which genuine subjectivity reigns. This would amount to a naturalized, historicized version of Kant's kingdom of ends, not outside of time and space but at the end of history.Footnote ¹⁰ There, people would not simply act on those maxims they could will to be universal laws, but produce and consume in a universalizable way. This kingdom is first and foremost a system of needs (economy), rather than a state, and the vocabulary of legislation would recede in the face of this economistic version of the Kantian ethical ideal.

If Hegel's ‘rational state’ (Rechtsphilosophie) is too removed from flesh-and-blood, living, labouring human beings, for a rapprochement between it and Marx's ideal of a ‘community of free producers’ then perhaps Hegel's ‘realm of shadows’ (Logik) is too—especially given the way it requires us to ascend from the concrete medium of representation (Vorstellung) to the abstract one of pure thought (Begriff). Yet in the course of reading (and re-reading) his book, I have learned not to bet against Abazari's ability to re-actualize Hegel's thought in ways that are as unexpected as they are deeply satisfying. So I conclude with a suggestion I take to be both mit und gegen Abazari. It is that a Hegelian ‘Logic’ of solidarity, the ‘Concept’ or ‘Idea’ of socialism or of a ‘a free community of producers’ may not be unthinkable after all—even if it is as of yet unthought.