Reading Hegel after Marx: Lukács and the Question of Teleology

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a rethinking of the concept of teleology in Marxist theory. In particular, I propose some reflections on György Lukács’s teleology of labour, addressed in The Young Hegel and subsequently reworked in The Ontology of Social Being. Lukács challenged an idealist notion of teleology understood as realisation of a transcendental principle posited a priori. He redefined the concept by showing how Hegel and Marx reintroduced the question of purpose as an essential quality of human labour. Against idealist conceptions, Lukács reimagined teleology as a secular purpose inherent to human praxis and the key to thinking agency within a materialist concept of history. Accordingly, a Marxist concept of teleology should highlight what Ernst Bloch described as the “anticipatory” character of consciousness, whereby teleology means the positing of an end that does not yet exist in reality and that exceeds the temporal horizon of the present. However, in his critique of Hegel, Lukács illustrates the ambivalent and contradictory dimension of teleology, a perspective that constantly relapses into temporal closure and determinism. While proposing a radical reading of Hegel, Lukács oscillates between the two extremes of a dialectical notion of teleology that he nonetheless helped to formulate.

KEYWORDS:

• Teleology
• Lukács
• Hegelian Marxism
• historical materialism
• labour

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Filippo Menozzi

Filippo Menozzi was awarded a PhD from the University of Kent in 2013 and is now a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University. He is the author of World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (Palgrave 2020) and guest-editor of a special issue of New Formations (no. 94, 2018) on Rosa Luxemburg and the postcolonial condition. He has published essays on critical theory, Marxism and world literature in journals including Rethinking Marxism, Textual Practice, College Literature and Interventions. He is section editor of the online journal Postcolonial Text.