Une politique jeune hégélienne de la nature. Le socialisme naturaliste de Moses Hess

Abstract

To Moses Hess, mankind’s history up to the present has only been a “natural history”. This article shows that this – at first sight puzzling – representation is part and parcel of Hess’s critique of mercantile alienation developed in his essay On the Essence of Money. From a historical-philosophical perspective, it aims at demonstrating that mankind’s trajectory so far has been prompted by the progress of domination, whose acme would be mercantile alienation. Secondly, from the standpoint of social ontology, such a negative conception of history is rooted in naturalist prejudice. As any society can be conceived of as a way of socializing human nature, the shopkeepers’ society must be criticized for it prevents the free development of our natural abilities and, first and foremost, of our abilities to cooperate. Finally, from a political viewpoint, there ensues that socialism, as the freely chosen and conscious organisation of cooperation, represents the (at last discovered) historical answer to the question raised by nature in us: how to live up to the abilities that the history of life has bequeathed on us?