Philosophy in the severe style: Method and value in Rose's Hegel and Marx

Abstract

In Hegel Contra Sociology, Gillian Rose argues that Hegel's political theory is written in the “severe style,” marking speculative thinking as the appropriate mode of exposition of capitalist modernity. By taking distance from Hegel, she maintains, Marx and Marxism retain a distinction between thought and actuality that forecloses a proper account of capital. I argue that Marx pursues speculative thinking when accounting for capital's logic of self-valorization. Speculative thinking in Rose's sense allows us to move beyond production, linking self-valorization to the historical coming to be of capital. Stephanie Smallwood's work is decisive, moving beyond the commodification of labor power for the extraction of surplus value in free labor, tracing the genesis of the capital relation and the money-form itself to the circulation of African people as commodities in the trade. This is not the prehistory of capital, a primitive accumulation, but the totality of conditions that articulate capital's movement.