Social Structure and Forms of Conciousness

by Meszaros, Istvan

• ISBN13: 9781583672044
• ISBN10: 1583672044
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-03-01
• Publisher: Monthly Review Pr

Summary

Today, as never before, the investigation of the close relationship between social structure defined by Marx as arising from the life-process of definite individuals and the various forms of consciousness is particularly important. We can only perceive what is possible by first identifying the historical process that constrains consciousness itself, and therefore social action.

Author Biography

Istvn Mszros left his native Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He is professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, where he held the chair of philosophy for fifteen years. Mszros is author of The Structural Crisis of Capital, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition, and Marx's Theory of Alienation, among other books.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 11
The Programmatic Orientation Toward Science	p. 27
“The Mastery of Man over Nature”	p. 27
Behaviourists and Weberians	p. 30
Mannheim's “Scientific Sociology of Culture”	p. 32
The Structural Links of Science-Oriented Ideology	p. 34
The General Tendency to Formalism	p. 37
Formalism and Conflictuality	p. 37
The Structural Affinity of Practical and Intellectual Inversions	p. 45
Reconciliation of Irrational Forms	p. 47
Formal/Reductive Homogenization and Universal Value-Equation	p. 51
The Social Substance of Operational Rationality	p. 53
The Concept of Nature as a Dehistoricized Formal Abstraction	p. 56
“Formal Rationality” and Substantive Irrationality	p. 61
The Standpoint of Isolated Individuality	p. 67
Individualistic Conceptions of Conflict and Human Nature	p. 67
The Elevation of Particularity to the Status of Universality	p. 70
The Inversion of Objective Structural Relationships	p. 73
Negative Determination of Philosophy and Social Theory	p. 79
Substance, Subjectivity, and Freedom	p. 79
The Positive Aspect of Critical Negation	p. 82
The Quantification of Quality and the Law of Measure	p. 83
Second Order “Mediations of the Mediation” and the Triumph of Negativity	p. 88
Reconciliatory Function of “Negativity as Self-Transcending Contradiction”	p. 90
Negativity in Sartre and Marcuse: Dependency on the Ideologically Dominant Discourse	p. 95
The Rise and Fall of Historical Temporality	p. 101
Historical Explanation in Ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages	p. 101
“Divine Providence” in Bourgeois Philosophies of History	p. 103
Vico's Conception of Civil Society and History	p. 108
Organic Models as Substitutes for Historical Explanation	p. 111
Vicissitudes of Historical Consciousness in the Twentieth Century	p. 114
“There Is Neither Necessity nor Meaning”	p. 119
“If Sense There Be, It Escapes Our Perception”: From Ranke and Tocqueville to Sir Lewis Namier and Beyond	p. 132
Social Antagonism and Historical Explanation	p. 136
Dualism and Dichotomies in Philosophy and Social Theories	p. 149
The Hidden Premises of Dichotomous Systems	p. 149
The Functional Imperative of Operational Exclusiveness	p. 151
Ruling Values Disguised as Instrumental Complexes: The Illusions of Value-Free Functionality	p. 155
Ideological Roots of Methodological Dualism	p. 159
The Inward-Oriented Subject of Philosophical Discourse	p. 162
From “Unreconciled Dualism” to Dualism of Reconciliation	p. 165
Moralizing Apriorism in the Service of the “Commercial Spirit”	p. 170
The Dominance of Counter-Value in Antinomous Value-Relations	p. 175
The Supersession of Dichotomies: The Question of Social Agency	p. 186
The Postulates of “Unity” and “Universality”	p. 205
The Incorrigible Circularity and Ultimate Failure of Individualistic Mediation	p. 205
“The Process of the Genus with the Individual”: The Reconciliatory Function of Anthropological Models	p. 216
Fragmentation and “Longing for Unity”	p. 232
“The Ideal General Will Should Also Be the Empirically General Will”	p. 251
Unification through the Material Reproduction Process	p. 261
Method in a Historical Epoch of Transition	p. 277
The Marxian Reorientation of Method	p. 277
From Hegel's “Science of Logic” to the Marxian View of Science	p. 298
The Critique of Political Economy	p. 317
Self-Critique as a Methodological Principle	p. 332
Categorical Reflections of Social Antagonism and the Central Categories of Socialist Theory	p. 353
Methodological Aspects of Mediation in an Epoch of Transition	p. 394
Index	p. 451
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