Book Review: <i>The Capital/Logic Debate</i> , by Andy Blunden BlundenAndy, The Capital/Logic Debate, Brill: Leiden, 2025; $USD124: ISBN: 9789004733565; https://brill.com/display/title/72444BlundenAndy, Marx’s Capital: Hegelian Sources, Brill: Leiden

The Capital/Logic Debate (2025) and Marx's Capital: Hegelian Sources (2026) should be read together as a sustained intervention into one of the most enduring methodological disputes in Marxist theory: how, precisely, Hegel matters for understanding Marx's Capital.The great virtue of both books is that Blunden seeks to move the debate beyond an unproductive oscillation between crude "Hegelianism" and equally crude dismissals of Hegel as merely ornamental to Marx.Against the many readings that search for one-to-one correspondences between Hegel's Science of Logic and Marx's critique of political economy, Blunden argues that Hegel's significance lies less in architectonic homology than in its scientific method.Marx, on this account, did not transpose Hegelian categories into political economy like a coded philosophical template or 'wooden schema'.Rather, he appropriated from Hegel a theory of concept-construction, of beginning, of analysis and synthesis, of how a science reconstructs a concrete totality from its simplest generative unit, the "germ-cell."Blunden situates The Capital/Logic Debate within a lineage that begins with Lenin's intensive study of Hegel's Science of Logic during his exile in 1914.Against the Engels-Plekhanov orthodoxy, which regarded Hegel as a superseded precursor whose "rational kernel" had already been extracted, Lenin insisted that Marx's Capital, especially its opening chapter, could not be properly understood without serious engagement with Hegel's Logic (pp.14-16).Blunden's intervention lies not in reaffirming this claim in general terms, but in clarifying its precise meaning.The book is essentially a systematic intervention into the secondary literature, organized around Blunden's dissatisfaction with dominant ways of relating Marx to Hegel.The book works through a series of engagements with key interpreters -among them Hiroshi Uchida, Mark Meaney, Terrell Carver, Geert Reuten, Arash Abazari, Tony Smith, Chris Arthur, and Fred Moseley -in order to show how the debate has repeatedly taken the wrong turn.The recurring problem, for Blunden, is "mirroring": the assumption that Marx's categories can be lined up with the logical sequence of Hegel's Logic in a stable and meaningful way.In Part 1, the focus is on the earliest forms of mapping Hegel onto Marx, including Hiroshi Uchida and Mark Meaney's work, that sought to establish a systematic one-to-one correspondence ("mirroring," p. 36), but which ignored Lenin's annotation which emphasized "the Idea of the 1456832C RS0010.