 a Marxist forgiving of Robert Brandem. Karl Marx is not an important influence on Robert Brandem's philosophy. The use of Marx in A Spirit of Trust is shallow. Nonetheless, Brandem's reading of Hegel has striking parallels with Marx's corrections to Hegel. Reading Hegel has led both men to a similar place. Brandem is an innocent Marxist. Section 1. Brandem's shallow appreciation of Marx. In order to maintain that the similarities of Brandem with Marx arise via Brandem's reading of Hegel rather than any reading of Marx, it is necessary, if undignified, to first show that even Brandem's explicit invocations of Marx are not at first hand. Without ever directly citing a work of Marx, Brandem evokes him in two ways. 1. As the first person who clearly described the fetishizing of human social relations as non-human objects. And 2. In the company of Freud, Durkheim, and others as giving causal explanations of normative attitudes. I will examine these two evocations in enough detail to show that Brandem's treatment of Marx is shallow and second hand. 1.1. Fetishism. In Adam Smith's History of Astronomy written in the 1750s, the invisible hand of Jupiter appears as the rude polytheist's explanation for what in contract law we still call acts of God. Brandem similarly presents religion as the paragon of normative statuses being mistaken as given rather than instituted by normative attitudes. He says, In this respect, enlightenment is right in its criticisms of faith. It does seriously misunderstand its object, which is not, as faith thinks, an objective independent being, but a product of its own thought and practice. Making a mistake of this kind is what in Marx's anthropological allegory is called fetishism. Smith's more famous invisible hand and Marx's own discussion of fetishism were both in reference to commodity exchange, a topic Brandem does not touch on. The closest that he comes is in a discussion of the value of precious metals. He says, Marx's paradigm of fetishism is understanding the relative and absolute value of precious metals as objective properties intrinsic to them in essentially the same sense that their density is. Marx makes passing mention to precious metals as fetish objects in debates on the law of theft of wood from 1842 and in the posthumously published economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. Nonetheless, the precious metals are not at all a parada by Spiel, a fetishism for Marx. In Das Kapital, he lays the groundwork for fetishism with a careful elaboration of a coat exchanging for two yards of linen. Marx elaborates an analogy between pieces of iron on one side of a scale measuring the weight of a sugarloaf on the one hand and two yards of linen measuring the value of a coat through their equation in exchange on the other hand. So the mass of a sugarloaf as measured in iron is akin to the value of a coat as measured in yards of linen. But this analogy is still far from comparing the value of gold to its density. When Marx explicitly introduces the fetishism of commodities, it is with the example of a table. The fact that Brandem speaks of the precious metals as Marx's paradigm rather than of coats linen or tables suggests that he is unfamiliar with the treatment of commodity fetishism in Kapital. Section 1.2, The Niedertrechtigkeit of the Great Unmaskers. We next turn to Brandem's inclusion of Marx in a genealogical tradition of great modernist unmaskers. I will give two quotes, the first quote. There is a temptation indulged and fostered by the genealogical tradition that stretches from Marx, Nietzsche and Freud in the 19th century through Foucault at the end of the 20th to take it that explanations in terms of causes trump explanations in terms of reasons, showing the latter to be illusory. Exhibiting the contingent features of things not addressed by a conceptual content or commitment that caused it to be as it is, unmasks talk of reasons as irrelevant mystification. Niedertrechtigkeit explanations take precedence over Eitelmütig ones. Now for a second quote. That the believer was born into a Baptist community is not evidence for the truth of predestination. This is the structure that underlines the delegitimizing force of genealogical explanations generally. The great unmaskers of the late 19th and early 20th century, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, all told stories of this shape. If one's approval of treating labor as a commodity is due to one's bourgeois upbringing, then the justifiability and hence the normative force, the authority of those commitments is challenged. For being raised in bourgeois circumstances is not evidence for the justice of labor markets. That's the end of the quote. Here, random implicitly credits Marx with the view that labor markets are unjust. This is incorrect. Precisely because Marx and Engels see normative attitudes themselves conditioned by economic relations as instituting normative statuses, in numerous places, they reject all talk of justice. One of the clearest is Engels in on the housing question. So this is what Engels says. And this justice is never anything but the ideologized glorified expression of existing economic relations at times from the conservative side, at times from the revolutionary side. The justice of the Greeks and Romans held slavery to be just. The justice of the bourgeois of 1789 demanded the abolition of feudalism because it was unjust. While in everyday life, in view of the simplicity of the relations which come into question, expressions like right, wrong, justice, conception of justice can be used without misunderstanding even in relation to social matters. They create, as we have seen, hopeless confusion in any scientific investigation of economic relations. In fact, much the same confusion as would be created in modern chemistry if the terminology of the Flegiston theory were to be retained. End of quote. Far from presenting labor markets as unjust as part of his overarching rhetorical strategy, in volumes one and two of Capital, Marx explicitly accepts the justice of labor markets by assuming that the laborer is always paid the full value of his labor power. Random's portrayal of Marx as niedertrechtig is itself one-sided. The recognition that you are a Baptist because your parents are Baptists need not undermine faith in predestination. It need lead only to the thorough study of theology. It is only after one has reasons to find predestination false that one invokes Baptist parents as the cause of an earlier error. Part of saying that we got something wrong is to show why we got it wrong. The Copernican theory is superior to the Ptolemaic, not only because it better fits the data collected by Brahe, but because the Copernican model can account for why the Ptolemaic model had looked plausible. Marx's unmasking move serves both a synchronic anthropological and a diachronic recollective rational reconstructive role. Anthropologically, after giving his own account of value and surplus value in volume one, Marx turns in volume three to explaining why value appears to the vulgar economists as resolving itself into wages, profits, and rents. Giving an anthropological account of the errors of superseded systems is simply a matter of intellectual honesty. If Adam Smith said the stick is bent and Marx said it is straight, that is not enough. Geist has not yet had an erfarum. Marx instead says of Adam Smith that Smith said of the straight stick that it was bent. In short, Marx gives a causal account of bourgeois economic theories only after he has shown them to be false. In theories of surplus value, the planned fourth volume of capital, Marx turns to the recollective rational reconstruction of political economy. He traces the labor theory of value to William Petty, 1623 to 1687, the origin of profit from surplus value to James Stewart, 1712 to 1780, the distinction between value and price of production as implicit in Ricardo, 1772 to 1823, etc. Marx credits the great intellectual achievements of classical political economy to the genius of these mighty dead, but their errors he dismisses as due to their bourgeois short-sightedness. Like Geist itself, Marx cannot achieve Edelmütigkeit without first passing through Niedertrechtigkeit. Explaining mistakes as caused and insights as reasoned is the practice of intellectual historiography that Brandem himself endorses. Thus, Marx is a forgiving Brandomian intellectual historian. Section 1.3. Recap on Brandem's use of Marx. In sum, when speaking of Marx, whether of fetishism or of Niedertrechtig an masking, Brandem speaks of a caricature that bears little resemblance to this great revolutionary. Section 2. Brandem's profound agreement with Marx. We have seen how Brandem falters in his assessment of Marx. Using Brandem's terminology, he has fallen short in his forgiveness of Marx insofar as his recollective rational reconstruction of Marx could have yielded him a more progressive Marx. But Brandem's hard-heartedness is itself very easy to forgive. First, with a Niedertrechtig attitude, one accepts that Brandem cannot have systematically read every thinker that comes up in his thick book. More importantly, with an Edelmütig attitude, it is precisely Brandem's cursory understanding of Marx that leads him to so convincingly vindicate the founder of dialectical materialism. Being no Hegel scholar, I defer to Holgate's assessment of Brandem's fidelity to Hegel. Those places where Brandem's paraphrase of Hegel are to Holgate in felicitous, I follow Holgate in interpreting as genuine philosophical disagreements between Brandem and Hegel. And many of these places Marx sides with Brandem against Hegel. More precisely put, the Hegel who speaks through Brandem and the Hegel who stood on his head speaks through Marx are two Hegel's who agree on the very points where both disagree with Holgate's Hegel. These points include, one, seeing history as endless and progressive, two, seeing the progressive development of Geist as made intelligible only by the development of the productive forces, three, giving a pragmatic account of norms, and four, preferring explicit socialist planning over the regulation of human affairs by unconscious adherence to unexamined norms. I'll take each of these four in turn. Section 2.1, an endless history. Brandem concurs with Marx by insisting on greater future-facing contingency than Holgate's Hegel does. In the vision of a spirit of trust, we face our predecessors as confessors and our successors as penitents. History is prospectively contingent and retrospectively necessary, but Holgate sees Hegel as being able, like Trotsky, to see the progress of history in advance. I quote Holgate. For Brandem and his Hegel, the progression is only retrospectively necessary. It is not the case that a given stage could have evolved in no other way than as to produce what appears as its successor. In my view, that is Holgate's view, this may be true of the development of empirical concepts, but it is hard to reconcile with Hegel's insistence that both phenomenology and speculative logic develop through a purely imminent forward-moving necessity. Marx's historical materialism is succinctly summed up in his adage from the 18th Rumeir of Louis Bonaparte that, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. Marx regards the enclosures of common land in the 15th to 18th century as retrospectively progressive, but he clearly would have fought them politically had he been there to do so and not out of reactionary nostalgia for feudalism, but in the belief that the future is contingent just as the past is retrospectively necessary. The proletariat is destined to overthrow capitalism just as a large boulder perched high on a mountainside is destined to roll down. This destiny is the boulder's potential energy, a calculable physical reality, whether the boulder in fact ever slides down the slope has no bearing on this destiny. Section 2.2, The Development of the Productive Forces. Brandon partly answers Holgate's call for a more prospective vision of historical progress, not in a spirit of trust, but in a lecture on Rorty. There is the possibility of sorting these retrospective stories according to prospective standards. The crude thought is, well, the new scientific theories we could judge, they better at least be able to keep the old machinery running. They better not be throwing away technology unless it's technology that can do something we could do before better than we could do it before. Well, now we say, well, what is better, that's retrospectively determined. No, there's a kind of prospective assessment. If you think about trying to persuade Aristotle that our natural science is better than his, he would not be impressed that we can measure the mass of an electron to the six or seven decimal places that we can, because electrons are nothing to him. But he would be impressed that we can blow really large holes in the ground, that we can move large things fast from one part of the world to another. Well, mostly he would be impressed by our medicine. This would be a prospective assessment that is prospective in the sense that somebody earlier in the tradition can assess whether we're better at doing something by their likes than they were. In other words, it is the development of the productive forces that gives a direction to history. As a subscription to historical materialism, one could not want more. Section 2.3, a pragmatic account of norms. Holgate sees Brandon as much more of a deontic pragmatist than Hegel. I quote from Holgate. Brandon is a pragmatist about all concepts and norms insofar as he thinks all are instituted by social and historical practices of recognition and recollection. This is true for Brandon of empirical and practical concepts, as well as meta-concepts, though the latter have a greater necessity as the proposed transcendental conditions of the former. In my view, Hegel might be sympathetic to the idea that empirical concepts are instituted by human practices since he highlights the active role of consciousness in forming such concepts in his philosophy of subjective spirit. He is not, however, a pragmatist about logical concepts, since he understands these to be inherent in thought and being and to be derivable a priori. And to the extent that such concepts are contained in empirical concepts, the latter are themselves not merely the product of social and historical institution. Hegel is also not a pragmatist about the main practical, legal, ethical, and political concepts. Marx certainly is a pragmatist about norms. That is exactly why Brandon sees Marx as niedertrechtig. Section 2.4 Socialist Planning Holgate sees there as being a wide distance between the self-consciousness of the communities of trust in Brandon's account and the creatures of habit found in Hegel's philosophy of right. I quote Holgate. Brandon acknowledges that each member of a community of trust identifies with all the others, but he understands this to mean taking co-responsibility for the practical attitudes of everyone. Similarly, he accepts that ethical individuals share common norms, but he maintains that they are responsible to such norms rather than being formed and informed by them. This insistence on the responsibility of individuals to one another and to norms looks to Hegelian eyes to be moral rather than truly ethical. One explanation for this might be that Brandon appears to regard individuals, agents as well as objects, as ontologically primary. He states, for example, that communities do not have attitudes individuals do. Any talk of being moved by a universal or of the movement of the begriff is thus for Brandon really about individuals doing something in response to a norm. On this view, individuals do things for reasons. They are not moved by reason as such. This seems to me, however, to miss an important dimension of how Gaelian thought and ethical life. End of quote. Brandon envisions a community democratically deliberating and taking explicit decisions on matters of common interest rather than passively submitting to existing norms, be they the Prussian law codes or the laws of market exchange. He envisions a communist society with a planned economy. Section three, conclusions. Although in a spirit of trust he only hints at it, in a number of verbal communications, Brandon has admitted that the phenomenology lends itself to his reading of Hegel more aptly than does the science of logic. It feels pertinent to mention that for Marx, too, the phenomenology was the work of Hegel's that he found closest to his own views. To quote Marx, their lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint. Brandon and Marx are emancipatory. This is less clear for Hegel. For Hegel, history ends with the Prussian state, and for Marx, history begins with the victory of the proletariat. For Hegel, trust and forgiveness are essentially components of modern ethical life. Neither therefore belongs principally to a postmodern age that is yet to come. Indeed, neither Hegel's phenomenology nor his philosophy proper aims to bring about a community of trust that does not yet exist. Hegel's thought does not have an edifying intent. Both Brandon and Marx write with a clear edifying intent. They both envision a future society structured much more than ours by trust and forgiveness.