Over at the Worst Social-Media Website, we have Rakesh Bhandari and Devin Goure sparring over whether you have to have a grounding in Hegel to fully grasp what Marx is doing in “Capital”:

Devin Goure: If you can’t see that the analysis of the commodity form in the opening pages of Capital remains heavily dependent upon Hegel then I’m not sure what to tell you.

Rakesh Bhandari: With or without Hegel, one could lay bare the dialectical logic at work: essence and appearance, appearance as the necessary form of essence, equivalent and relative forms being both mutually assuming and contradictory, and later quantitative change becoming qualitative change. But does one have to have studied Hegel to understand or ground such ‘dialectical’ knowledge as Lenin claimed? I think not.

Devin Goure: Where else is knowledge of dialectical logic supposed to come from, exactly, if not from studying philosophy?

Rakesh Bhandari: Why can't you read Marx's text and understand each of the relations that I specified without reading Hegel?

Devin Goure: This is what I find extremely puzzling. Of course you could, to some extent, but it seems obvious that your understanding would be deeper if you also studied Hegel, just as your understanding of Hegel will be deeper if you also study Kant.

Rakesh Bhandari: Show me how.

Devin Goure: If I could do that in a tweet or two then I’d be refuting my own argument, no?

Rakesh Bhandari: Fair enough.

Devin Goure: I have mixed feelings on this front about Hegel, admittedly. 1) I personally find Hegel more difficult to read than just about any other philosopher. 2) I’m usually sympathetic to more anti-Hegelian thinkers, like Deleuze. And 3) Hegel has by now been worked and reworked. That said, I think part of my defense of reading dense, primary texts is that it’s the best practice in the art of philosophical thinking. I did a grad seminar on a close reading just the first few chapters of the Phenomenology, and I did find it really rewarding.

& I HAVE VIEWS:

I am with Rakesh here: Hegel strikes me as a thinker who, like Karl Polanyi, like Hyman Minsky, is best understood by reading the work of his best applied students. You best understand Minsky by reading Charlie Kindleberger applying his work. You best understand Polanyi by reading the work of his students like Margaret Somers, Fred Block, and Sheri Berman. Once you have read the students, you can understand what the master was getting at. But unless you really want to ovary-up you get little extra. I think Rakesh is saying that Hegel is for trained philosophical professionals only, if you seek insight. I tend to agree.

I am a huge fan of dense deep reading of difficult primary texts. But it is not a skill that can or should be universally taught in the information-flood firehose age we have moved into. So now it is a genuine question: do you assign people to deep-read "Capital", or do you give them "Wage Labor & Capital" and "The Communist Manifesto" and then move on to doing episodes in political-economy history? I find myself of AT LEAST three minds about this.

But I should say that I LOVE teaching the "Smith, Marx, Keynes" deep-reading course that Ravi Bhandari designed, whenever I get the chance to do so. And I think it does a lot of good for people to take it.

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