Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx - Hardcover

Stathis Kouvelakis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859846025 ISBN 13: 9781859846025

Publisher: Verso, 2003

Synopsis

Throughout the nineteenth century, German philosophy was haunted by the spectre of the French Revolution. Kant, Hegel, and their followers spent their lives wrestling with its heritage, trying to imagine a specifically German path to modernity: a ‘revolution without revolution’. Trapped in a politically frozen society, German intellectuals were driven to brood over the nature of the revolutionary experience.

In this ambitious and original study, Stathis Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in the effervescence of German thought before the 1848 revolutions. He shows how the attempt to chart a moderate and reformist path entered into deep crisis, generating two antagonistic perspectives. In one camp, represented by Moses Hess and the early Friedrich Engels, were those socialists who sought to discover a principle of reconciliation and harmony in social relations, by bypassing the question of revolutionary politics. In sharp contrast, the poet Heinrich Heine and the young journalist Karl Marx developed a new perspective articulating revolutionary rupture and struggle for democracy, thereby redefining the very notion of politics.

About this title

About the Author:

Stathis Kouvelakis is the co-editor of the Dictionnaire Marx Contemporain and a member of the Actuel Marx editorial board.

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

From Publishers Weekly:

This ambitious tract on the formation of Karl Marx's ideas brings together disparate currents in an original and multifaceted reading. Combining intellectual history and biographical narrative, with a hemming and hawing distrust of both modes, Kouvelakis re-evalutates the cultural context of Marx's ideological development, and the constellation of personalities that made it possible. Poet Heinrich Heine, the "first ironic German," gains some footing in Kouvelakis's evaluation, while Engels recedes a bit, and the primacy of the 1848 French Revolution's effects on the thought of 19th century German philosophy in general remains unquestioned. Overall, the book produces the effect of bright webbing strung between the people and events of a pivotal time, as the ancien regime of Europe segued convulsively into modernity, winding pathways of thought leading always towards the explosive event of revolution. Admittedly, some of this effect might be a result of unwieldy translations: "I have chosen to approach the early Marx's trajectory as a theoretical event that is utterly incomprehensible when it is considered apart from the sequence that precedes it (chronologically, to begin with, but also in the order of my exposition) yet is radically irreducible to it." And that's only the second half of a weighty, establishing thought. For scholars of Marx or European philosophy, and those accustomed to labored, academic prose, this book offers a fresh methodology and original interpretation of Marx's achievements.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1859846025
• ISBN 13: 9781859846025
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 440