Hegel or Spinoza?

Althusser develops a concept of contradiction radically different from that of Hegel and those variants of Marxism that identify Marx's dialectic with Hegel's. Unfortunately, Althusser's rejection of the Hegelian dialectic is often interpreted as a rejection of the very idea of historical process or, even worse, as evidence of the inability of Structural Marxism to develop a satisfactory alternative to the Hegelian concept of contradiction. Althusser's Spinozism has served critics admirably in this regard, for as Althusser himself acknowledges, "whatever you do, you cannot find in Spinoza what Hegel gave to Marx: contradiction" (Althusser 1976, 139). Spinoza lacks a concept of contradiction because he is unconcerned with historical development and social determination as opposed to logical propositions pertaining to the necessary existence

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and qualities of things. Spinoza's concept of structural causality is, in effect, identified with the laws of logic and thereby denied full theoretical development. From Spinoza's rationalist perspective, restricted as it is to the "eternity of the concept" (to use Althusser's apt characterization), physical and social change is dismissed as secondary and uninteresting, part of an infinite chain of cause and effect associated with an inadequate knowledge of the world. Time is an inadequate concept for Spinoza because it is associated with the subjectivity of the imagination, not the objectivity of reason. Spinoza does not simply subordinate temporal development and social determinations to the laws of nature, a materialist and realist move with which there can be little quarrel; he goes on to empty these concepts of all significance by subordinating the laws of nature to the laws of logic within the framework of a rationalist ontology.

Hegel, of course, takes the immobility of Spinoza's system as his starting point. Althusser acknowledges that Hegel introduces a developmental process within the absolute based on the dialectical logic of the negation of the negation, but no more than Spinoza can Hegel be said to have provided a concept of the differential effectivity of social structures of the type that Althusser finds in Marx. Furthermore, Althusser maintains that Hegel is able to "set Spinoza in motion" only by means of a philosophical regression, namely, by reintroducing expressive causality and the category of the subject into the concept of the absolute, a move that Spinoza's materialist concept of structural causality, its rationalism notwithstanding, had already discredited. Pierre Macherey (1979) goes so far as to argue that Hegel could transcend Spinoza only by failing to understand him in this regard. For Althusser and other Structural Marxist critics of Hegel such as Macherey and Godelier, Hegel's expressive or immanent causality cannot think social determination or contradiction except on the condition that they are ultimately emptied of all meaningful difference, that is, on the condition that they be conceptualized, in Godelier's words, expressively as an identity of opposites and not structurally as a unity of differences (Godelier 1972).^[5] It is Althusser's position that Marx could not have developed his concept of economic determination by simply reversing Hegel's idealist dialectic and creating a materialist version with the same form. On the contrary, for Marx to have worked out a differential concept of structural causality, that is, Spinoza with a concept of contradiction, it was necessary to break completely with Hegel's expressive concept of dialectic.

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Historical development and social determination were introduced into social theory, according to Althusser, not by Hegel but by Montesquieu, who must also be credited with originating the materialist conception of history as "the concrete behavior of men in their relations with nature and with their past" (Althusser 1972, 59). In addition, Montesquieu was "the first to propose a positive principle of universal explanation for history ; a principle which is not just static : the totality explaining the diversity of the laws and institutions of a given government; but also dynamic : the law of the unity of nature and principle, a law making it possible to think the development of institutions and their transformations in real history, too. In the depths of the countless laws which come and go, he thus discovered a constant connection uniting the nature of a government to its principle; and at the core of this constant connection, he stated the inner variation of the relation, which by the transitions of the unity from adequacy to inadequacy, from identity to contradiction, makes intelligible the changes and revolutions in the concrete totalities of history" (Althusser 1972, 50). Althusser also finds in Montesquieu a form of determination in the last instance that anticipates Marx; in Montesquieu, though, the concept is defined in terms of "manners and morals," a shortcoming stemming from the historically conditioned fact that Montesquieu is, in Althusser's view, "unable to seek in the conditions he is describing a deeper unity, which would presuppose a complete political economy " (Althusser 1972, 59).

According to Althusser, Spinoza reconciled existence and reason by means of a rationalist, but also a materialist, concept of the absolute. Hegel "rediscovers" the perspective of the absolute already developed by Spinoza (and with it the resolution of the pseudo-problem of subject/object dualism) and imbues it with a concept of historical process and social totality derived from Montesquieu. However, Althusser notes, the Hegelian synthesis comes at a high price—ruthlessly subordinating the materialism of both Spinoza and Montesquieu to an idealist teleology originating in the "pre-established harmony" of Leibniz and transmitted to Hegel by way of the ethical evolutionism of Kant's "hidden plan of nature." The Hegelian Idea is not simply Spinoza's God set in motion, according to Althusser; it is Spinoza's God embodied in the categories of a subject and a goal or, more precisely, in the concept of an immanent and expressive process of becoming-subject, or self-realization, which constitutes at once the subject and the goal of history. But, of course, this is not Spinoza at all. Althusser defends Spinoza's

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concept of the absolute, despite the imperturbability of its rationalist foundation, because it forces us to think determination in a materialist and "non-immanent" way, a way that reveals, in advance, "the secret alliance between Subject and Goal which 'mystifies' the Hegelian dialectic" (Althusser 1976, 136-37). For Althusser, the development of a scientific concept of contradiction requires not only that we abandon the metaphysical category of the absolute, the mark of Althusser's break with Spinozist rationalism as well as Hegelian idealism, but also that we discard the expressive concept of causality by which Hegel subjugates process to the absolute and by which Hegelian Marxism thinks the social formation as an expressive totality, not as a structured whole.