Philosophy and Revolution From Kant to Marx

by Kouvelakis, Stathis; Goshgarian, G. M.; Jameson, Fredric

• ISBN13: 9781859844717
• ISBN10: 1859844715
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Stathis Kouvelakis is a reader in political theory at King's College London. He is author and editor of many books, including the La France en révolte. Luttes sociales et cycles politiques (Textuel, Paris, 2007), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Haymarket, New York, 2009) and Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (co-edited with Sebastian Budgen and Slavoj Zizek, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007), a book translated in German, Italian, Spanish and Turkish.

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Preface	xi
Fredric Jameson
Introduction: From Philosophy to Revolution	1	(8)
Kant and Hegel, or the Ambiguity of Origins	9	(35)
A Foundation for Politics?	12	(11)
The impossible compromise	12	(4)
Politics between a foundation and the salto mortale	16	(3)
The force of events	19	(4)
Superseding the Revolution?	23	(21)
Is the revolution Kantian?	23	(4)
Revolution as a process, revolution as event	27	(2)
Short of liberalism, and beyond it	29	(9)
A state beyond politics?	38	(6)
Spectres of Revolution: On a Few Themes in Heine	44	(77)
Flanerie as dialectical exercise	47	(6)
The philosophy of history: A clinical description of decomposition	53	(29)
The politics of the name	82	(6)
Exorcising the spectres	88	(11)
The other German Road: revolutionary democracy	99	(22)
Moses Hess, Prophet of a New Revolution?	121	(46)
`We Europeans...'	123	(6)
From the `social' to the state	129	(6)
Defending the German Road	135	(10)
Radicalization or flight to the front	145	(13)
The `religion of love and humanity'	158	(9)
Friedrich Engels Discovers the Proletariat, 1842-1845	167	(65)
The `English Condition': The Ancien Regime plus Capitalism?	172	(21)
Germany-England	172	(6)
The status of critique: Hegel in Feuerbach	178	(7)
The inevitable revolution	185	(8)
The Proletariat: `Population' or `Class'?	193	(39)
From the `social' to `socialism': The great romance of organization	194	(5)
A physiologist in the big city	199	(8)
From class struggle to race war (and vice versa)	207	(4)
The battlefield	211	(6)
Tertium datur?	217	(2)
Revolution without a revolution?	219	(13)
Karl Marx: From the Public Sphere to Revolutionary Democracy, 1842-1844	232	(105)
Fighting for Freedom with Pinpricks	237	(38)
The `party of the concept'	237	(6)
Non-contemporaneousness in the Rhineland	243	(3)
From civil society to the state	246	(10)
The system of the free press	256	(11)
Volksgeist and revolution	267	(8)
The Roads of Exile	275	(62)
The ship of fools	275	(13)
Hegel beyond Hegel	288	(15)
The origins of permanent revolution: `true democracy'	303	(12)
The new world	315	(9)
The radical revolution	324	(5)
The paradoxical protagonist	329	(3)
`Nulla salus sine Gallis'	332	(5)
Conclusion: Self-Criticism of the Revolution	337	(16)
Notes	353	(70)
Index	423